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The American Prospect - articles by authorenThe Obama Doctrine, Revisitedhttp://prospect.org/article/obama-doctrine-revisited-0
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>Several weeks before President Barack Obama announced an escalation of the Afghanistan War at West Point, a group of journalists and think-tankers met for dinner at the Washington, D.C., embassy of a NATO ally to debate war strategy. Chatham House rules apply to the dinner, so I'm not allowed to tell you who said what or even what embassy it was, but for all the disagreement among intelligent people about a sensible way forward in Afghanistan -- or out of it -- one clear, declarative, and unchallenged statement emerged. Whatever troop increase Obama decided was necessary, NATO would make sure the U.S. was not alone. </p>
<p>To say this was hardly a foregone conclusion is an understatement. Since taking office in 2006, Robert Gates, the secretary of defense Obama chose to inherit from George W. Bush, has dutifully trudged to NATO defense ministerials and special summits to implore the Europeans to increase their troop commitments to Afghanistan. Each time, Gates has made an impassioned plea about the future of the alliance and the necessity of the Afghan mission, and each time, he has received a polite reception and a pittance of troops, if any. Asked at the dinner why this time would be different, especially with Afghanistan skepticism rising in Europe, the foreign diplomats first expressed a desire to see Afghanistan become a stable nation and then leveled with us: The allies have an interest in the success of the Obama administration. </p>
<p>In early 2008, I interviewed the foreign-policy and national-security brain trust of the Obama campaign for this magazine to gain a sense of what a world led by President Obama would look like. There were two big takeaways. The first was something I called "dignity promotion," an inchoate idea that the architecture of international alliances and institutions ought to prioritize human dignity, material as well as aspirational, in order to achieve global stability and prosperity. Implicit in the idea was that Obama would return the U.S. to its pre-Bush role as leader and champion of international cooperation to build a world in which American power and global prosperity were seen as mutually supporting objectives. The second was a meta-point about a path to get there: by confronting what Obama's advisers called the "politics of fear" that restricted what was possible for America to achieve on the world stage. </p>
<p>Now that the Obama administration has been in office for nearly a year and a half, it's time to return to those ideas and judge their merits, their impacts, and whether they have guided Obama's presidency at all. It would be unfair to offer firm judgments over such a short period in office. (Rendering a verdict on the Bush administration's foreign policy in April 2002, for instance, would miss an entirely unnecessary war.) But Obama's foreign policy so far contains a magnitude and a direction, and it remains notably similar to what he promised to deliver in his 2008 campaign. </p>
<p>On dignity promotion, the administration has racked up real successes and set the stage for several more. Obama has proved that the world is prepared for positive-sum American leadership -- whether it's by restructuring U.S. global economic partnerships through the G-20 instead of the more restricted G-8 set of powerful nations; whether it's resetting relationships with great and rising powers like Russia and China over contentious issues like Iran and climate change; whether it's explaining to the Muslim world that America's commitment to its well-being reaches far beyond securing its cooperation in the fight against terrorism. Dignity promotion, a new twist on the very old idea of liberal internationalism, is still taking shape. But the early evidence is that it's working -- for America and for the world. </p>
<p>Where Obama hasn't made nearly as much progress, to the disappointment of his supporters, is on confronting the politics of fear. The first days -- literally -- of the administration were defined by sweeping pledges to end torture, close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, and revise the U.S. approach to terrorism detentions. But that early promise is over. While the administration has taken political risks, revamping interrogations around humane information-gathering methods and charging top terrorism captives in civilian courts, it has lost battle after battle with Congress over Guantánamo. Instead of ending the Bush administration's military commissions, an ad hoc and unsuccessful forum for trying war criminals that the courts have rejected, the Obama administration has merely revamped them. It has reserved the right to hold people it considers dangerous indefinitely without charge, which violates the fundamental spirit of the Constitution. And its plan for closing Guantánamo involves moving the detainees to an Illinois prison, preserving the two key features that have made Gitmo an international symbol of lawlessness -- military commissions and indefinite detention. The most charitable judgment possible is that the administration picks its battles with the politics of fear very carefully. </p>
<p>It's tempting to conclude that as long as the administration racks up substantive international successes, its handling of domestic politics will appear trivial. After all, the right-wing outcry over Obama's refusal to torture Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be Christmas bomber, was tempered by the revelation that Pakistan and the CIA have been arresting the Afghan Taliban's top leadership, something absolutely no one in Washington thought likely during the last decade. But to count this as a success is to misunderstand the ambition and promise of the Obama doctrine. </p>
<p>"What we're trying to get to is a sustainable approach," says Ben Rhodes, the influential deputy national security adviser for strategic communications. "Something that won't just be the Obama administration's approach to these issues but will be the <i>next</i> administration's." Unless the administration begins more forcefully confronting the politics of fear, it won't be able to instill public confidence and build political will for durable international institutions and global partnership. Dignity promotion will not outlast Obama unless he more thoroughly confronts the demagoguery it inspires. </p>
<p></p><center>***</center>
<p>Most U.S. administrations would have sent a military presence to assist in a humanitarian disaster in the Western Hemisphere. When Haiti was hit by a major earthquake in January, the Obama administration sent much more: an entire Army brigade as well as the medical ship the <i>USNS Comfort</i>, the <i>USS Bataan</i>, and the <i>Bataan</i>'s detachment of 2,200 Marines -- even with two wars going on. The administration also tapped the civilian elements of government to aid the Haitian rescue and reconstruction mission. Rajiv Shah, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), practically lived in Haiti for a month coordinating development and reconstruction aid from the front. When firefighters from Los Angeles County pulled an elderly woman from the remains of a collapsed building, Haitians actually chanted "USA!" A video of the scene has been viewed more than 70,000 times on YouTube. Dignity: promoted. </p>
<p>Of course, aiding Haiti comes with no political cost. In other nations and other situations, building an architecture of international cooperation that favors human dignity can provoke a backlash, so the first step is securing the cooperation of often-recalcitrant nations. For the Obama administration's gamble to work, the rest of the world first needs to see that the U.S. is once again "willing to commit to a new era of engagement based on mutual interests and mutual respect," as Gen. Jim Jones, Obama's national-security adviser, told the Center for American Progress in January. Jones called that commitment to engagement "the defining feature of our foreign policy." </p>
<p>There is evidence that this feature is paying off. After a series of high-profile embraces of Russia in September, President Dmitry Medvedev for the first time indicated he was open to U.S.–backed sanctions on Iran for its nuclear program and began negotiating a new bilateral treaty to mutually reduce U.S. and Russian stockpiles of nuclear weapons and secure loose nuclear material. Remarkably, Georgia, which went to war with Russia in 2008, also has maintained its relationship with the U.S., as Eka Tkeshelashvili, Georgia's national-security adviser, told me in February. Georgia even sent a battalion of soldiers to Afghanistan's volatile Helmand Province, which it calls the "Holbrooke Brigade" after the Obama administration's special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Obama's visit to China in November earned rave reviews, and Obama gave a speech in Shanghai outlining a future of mutual cooperation, challenging China in a non-confrontational way to ease its restrictions on civil, political, and human rights. </p>
<p>There have been disappointments as well. At the global climate summit in Copenhagen, Obama and other world leaders were unable to yield "anything more than a decision to 'take note' of an intention to act" on climate change, as Al Gore put it, due to the mutually reinforcing downward spiral of Chinese obstructionism and U.S. legislative inaction. </p>
<p>Still, if there is an example of how "engagement based on mutual interests and mutual respect" has succeeded beyond anyone's expectations, it's Pakistan. For years, intelligence professionals and military officers warned that the Afghanistan War could not be successfully concluded while the Pakistani government allowed the Afghan Taliban leadership to operate from its territory, providing resources, guerrillas, and strategic direction for its forces across the border. And for just as long, the Bush administration issued directives to the Pakistani military that the Pakistanis promptly ignored. Once Obama came into office, his national-security team absorbed Pakistani complaints that U.S. policy was limited merely to terrorism. Obama opened the aperture, pushing Congress to pass a $7.5 billion, five-year aid package for Pakistani governance and civil society, along with a new military aid package for counterinsurgency support. The administration stopped publicly criticizing Pakistani lassitude on counterterrorism and gave it two major pieces of additional support: CIA drones began targeting the leaders of Pakistan's own Taliban, who had killed and terrorized hundreds of Pakistanis, and pressed India to return to diplomatic dialogue. </p>
<p>In February, the effort began to pay dividends. Pakistanis aided by the CIA arrested Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the deputy commander of the Taliban, by far the highest-ranking Taliban capture in eight years of war. Within days, the Pakistanis began to round up more leaders of the Taliban movement it had sponsored by proxy since the mid-1990s. No one is quite sure what the Pakistanis' gambit is, and the cynical explanation is that they are trying to shape the terms of a peace deal between the Taliban and the Afghan government. If that's true, however, it entails a conclusion to the Afghanistan War around circumstances that favor U.S. interests. </p>
<p>Perhaps the most complex problem from the perspective of dignity promotion is Iran. During 2009, Obama made a visible effort to reach out to Iran on a variety of fronts. He recorded a video for the Persian New Year to offer respect and goodwill to the Iranian public and wrote a personal message to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the leader of the clerical regime, earning him the mutual ridicule of the Iranian regime and the American right. But in the middle of the year, the Green Movement -- the massive and sustained popular protests against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and, within months, the entire regime -- challenged the administration's presumption that Iran at least had stable leadership. Suddenly, repression increased to levels not seen since the short-lived student protests of the 1990s, all as new revelations of hidden Iranian nuclear progress emerged by the fall. </p>
<p>For the first time in the administration, dignity promotion was a poor guide for bilateral relations. Diplomatic outreach appeared to violate its spirit, as the one fairly clear message from the Green Movement to the outside world was to not legitimize the regime through diplomacy. But promoting the stability of the region depended upon forestalling a nuclear Iran, especially as Israel threatened airstrikes against the Iranian nuclear program. As soon as the Green Movement emerged in June, conservatives pressed Obama to adopt a more hostile posture and doubted his commitment to human rights when he didn't. </p>
<p>Instead, Obama sought to remove the U.S. from the equation -- and in doing so, he advanced Iranian dignity and nonproliferation efforts at the same time. Obama did not embrace the Green Movement, speaking instead about the regime's need to live up to its international human-rights obligations, a measure preventing the regime from portraying the Greens as American stooges. "The power of the Green Movement is that it's not an American-sponsored movement; it's an indigenous movement," Rhodes says. All of a sudden, a regime reliant on demagogic hatred of the U.S. was unable to sell its familiar story. "This isn't about the United States and a conflict with the Iranian government anymore," Rhodes continues. "This is about the Iranian government and what it can tell its own people about the future it has for them." </p>
<p>At the same time, Obama's visible and unrequited efforts to respect the regime's legitimate rights to peaceful nuclear energy helped convince once-recalcitrant nations like Russia, formerly Iran's de facto protector at the United Nations Security Council, to consider sanctioning Iran for its illicit enrichment. (That "reset" with Russia paid dividends.) At the Security Council later this spring, Ambassador Susan Rice will push through a sanctions package targeting the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, a hard-line wing of the Iranian military that both largely controls the nuclear program and is responsible for much internal repression. A Green Movement activist in Tehran told me that Iranians, typically unenthusiastic about economic pressure, would not oppose sanctions aimed at the IRGC. </p>
<p>"The international community is more united than it's ever been on Iran. You see nonaligned countries voting to censure Iran. That hasn't happened before in the kind of margin that we saw in the [International Atomic Energy Agency] Board of Governors' vote," Rhodes contends, referring to a rare diplomatic victory against the regime last year. "Iran, by any measure, is in a weaker position today than it was when we took office, and the international community is in a stronger position today as it relates to Iran than when we took office." So far, dignity promotion passed one of its hardest tests, demonstrating that it can be a creative solution to unlocking the facile and binary choices between promoting human rights and promoting global security. </p>
<p>But at the same time, the Iranian regime's internal repression and self-marginalizing geopolitics deferred what will be among the most domestically controversial principles of the Obama administration: direct negotiation with unsavory and anti-American international actors. Obama has not yet convinced the public that he should put American prestige on the line for such talks. That fits a familiar pattern for Obama throughout 2009 -- one that could upend his administration's international agenda. </p>
<p></p><center>***</center>
<p>By this summer, the Afghanistan surge should be complete, which will mean Obama will have nearly tripled the number of troops there; placed one of the leading lights of the U.S. Army at the effort's helm; reconfigured war strategy overwhelmingly; and, perhaps most important, demonstrated a willingness to stake his presidency on the successful conclusion of a war his predecessor considered an afterthought. Yet a recurrent feature of GOP criticism is that the president is, as Dick Cheney put it in December, "trying to pretend we are not at war." </p>
<p>The administration rose to the bait. Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director, blogged a compendium of practically every utterance of the word "war" by Obama. What he might also have mentioned was Obama's vast expansion of the CIA's drone-strike program in Pakistan; an expanded but still largely unclear role for the Joint Special Operations Command for counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan; and another expansion of military operations against al-Qaeda affiliates in Yemen and Somalia. That's a lot of war. </p>
<p>Notice what the White House didn't say. The administration didn't challenge the presumption, by Cheney and his allies, that the default posture against al-Qaeda ought to be ceaseless war. Intelligence and counterterrorism professionals say fairly frequently that granting al-Qaeda the rhetorical status of "warriors" plays into the extremists' hands. What they can't take is being called criminals and murderers, particularly murderers of innocents. That's why, for instance, Ayman Al-Zawahri, bin Laden's deputy, took the rare step of directly soliciting and answering critics' questions in a 2008 audiotape that centered largely around refuting the charges of murder. A February 2010 video, by contrast, said that Obama's policies "are no less ugly than the crimes of his predecessor." </p>
<p>The politics of fear may have lost some of its potency since Bush left office. But the Obama administration has occasionally governed as if that fear continues unabated, particularly concerning terrorism. In May, Obama announced that some Guantánamo detainees would be tried in military commissions -- the quasi-legal system created after September 11 that has convicted exactly three terrorists, compared to more than 300 sentenced by federal courts -- and which Obama had opposed as a senator. What's more, Obama floated the prospect that some detainees could neither be charged nor released, requiring instead some form of indefinite detention without charge, a decision embraced in early 2010 by a Justice Department task force. Obama did not explain how he knew someone was dangerous but couldn't convince a court of that danger. The substantive effect was to transform Obama's pledge to close Guantánamo into a bargain to transfer detainees to a facility in Illinois where they will face either indefinite detention or military commissions -- in other words, exactly what they face at Guantánamo Bay. </p>
<p>Predictably, the president's conservative critics didn't embrace his rightward move as a well-intentioned compromise. They doubled down on the line that his pledge to close Guantánamo is endangering America, and they concluded from his embrace of indefinite detention that he can be compelled to abandon the pledge entirely. Sen. Mitch McConnell gave a speech in February advancing every argument possible against closing Guantánamo, even the civil-libertarian contention that al-Qaeda will use "a new long-term detention facility inside the United States for the same recruiting and propaganda purposes for which they've used other courts and Guantánamo in the past." In February, Sen. Lindsey Graham conditionalized GOP support for closing Guantánamo -- a position once supported by John McCain -- on the administration abandoning its plan to try 9-11 attacker Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in a civilian court. </p>
<p>In other words, a compromise plan on Guantánamo Bay has disappointed progressive supporters and only intensified right-wing criticism of Obama. It is impossible to say that Obama would be in a better political position had he simply announced he would either try terrorism suspects in civilian courts or release them if there wasn't compelling evidence against them. As the criticism intensifies, though, the Obama team has played to win the news cycle rather than change the debate. After a cable-news-driven outcry against Obama's decision to put the would-be Christmas bomber on trial, the White House's counterterrorism chief, John Brennan, wrote a pugilistic op-ed in <i>USA Today</i> pointing out that "there have been three convictions of terrorists in the military tribunal system since 9/11, and hundreds in the criminal justice system." A compelling point, had Obama not embraced those military tribunals. </p>
<p>It's not as if Obama hasn't confronted the politics of fear at all. Some fever swamps of the right still lambaste Obama for not stressing the Islamic character of al-Qaeda. In fact, Brennan explained in August that the administration deliberately didn't use the word "jihadist" in order to deny al-Qaeda any claim to Muslim heroism. "We don't afford them any religious stature," Rhodes says. "That's more important to them than being called 'warriors.'" </p>
<p>But Obama's inconsistent confrontation of the politics of fear fails to build a constituency for the very large changes that he envisions. And it's coming at a time when his broader agenda is running into a rejectionist and hyper-empowered GOP Senate minority that is very likely to grow after November. The White House's greatest shortcoming is that its efforts at political combat are aimed at staving off defeat rather than sowing the seeds of victory. </p>
<p>Obama, however, has an advantage: The politics of fear appears less potent now. After the failed Christmas bombing, the GOP campaign against Obama was relentless, with politicians and mouthpieces lining up to denounce the president's weakness. While his critics brayed, Obama launched a systemic review, made recommendations, stepped up assistance to the Yemeni government against al-Qaeda, refused to torture Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, charged him in criminal court and ultimately got him to talk to interrogators by shaming him with his disappointed family. A <i>Washington Post</i> poll in early February found that Obama's approval rating on counterterrorism actually increased three points. The public trusted him to handle terrorism by five points more than the GOP, which had enjoyed a polling advantage on national security since at least Vietnam. </p>
<p>By any measure, the attacks on Obama failed. But they haven't stopped, as the GOP considers them an investment in a future public repudiation of Obama. And fending off an anachronistic and failed set of policy alternatives was not the promise of the Obama presidency. The Obama team pledged to be present at the creation of a new American-led internationalism, with the promotion of human dignity at its core and lasting stability and prosperity as its promise. And there the administration's pragmatism is a blessing and a burden. "If we measure our efforts against an ideal, we won't succeed," Rhodes says. "But if you measure them with regard to progress, then we are confident that the legacy of this administration can be an America that has renewed its leadership and its strength and influence in an international system that is functioning better." The past 17 months have proved that the world will largely follow where President Obama will lead -- if he's willing to lead. </p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 24 Mar 2010 15:20:19 +0000148547 at http://prospect.orgSpencer AckermanHuman Wrongshttp://prospect.org/article/human-wrongs-0
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>Liberalism in the 20th century made two enduring contributions to American foreign policy. Early on, it contended that global stability and prosperity were better guaranteed by architectures of international cooperation than by great-power competition. Later, it brought the human-rights revolution to the center of geopolitics, declaring that state sovereignty provided no excuse for impunity. As the 21st century began, Samantha Power, a journalist barely in her 30s, exposed the hollowness at the core of those contributions. </p>
<p><i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0061120146?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=theamerpros-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=0061120146">A Problem from Hell</a><img width="1" height="1" border="0" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=theamerpros-20&amp;l=as2&amp;o=1&amp;a=0061120146" alt="" style="border: medium none ! important; margin: 0px ! important;" /></i>, Power's first book and her masterpiece, explored the United States' consistent lack of interest in preventing and stopping genocide, a problem that the foreign-policy establishment did not realize it had. Power, returning from a searing experience of reporting from the Balkans, discovered that respect for human rights was a liberal fiction that did not survive first contact with organized eliminationist slaughter. In a hybrid style that blended historical scholarship, outraged polemicism, and unabashed activism, Power revealed that such indifference was a feature, not a bug. "The system, as it stands now," she charged, "is working." </p>
<p>Before Power, I didn't appreciate how U.S. support for human rights was so empty; how the architecture of international power needed so drastically to be reshaped in order to preserve human rights; or how radical the human-rights revolution actually is. Until I read Power's book, I only <i>thought</i> I was a progressive. </p>
<p>The structure of <i>A Problem From Hell</i> is frighteningly similar to the horrific phenomenon it documents. Each chapter, a case study of a different genocide, proceeds in stages: warning signs of the bloodbath to proceed; recognition by U.S. policy-makers of its imminence or execution; and then an insufficient response. The fourth stage, empty recrimination, unfolds only implicitly throughout the narrative. The repetition both builds the intensity of each wrenching story and underscores how pitilessly the nightmare unfolds unimpeded. Power doesn't write this book so much as she curates it. </p>
<p>Its target is your conscience. Every excuse for allowing a genocide to proceed is herded to the abattoir. <i>We didn't know; we couldn't have stopped it; intervention would have been ultimately more damaging; how could we adjudicate ancient hatreds; what responsibility did we have to act?</i> -- every one of these objections is a fallback position after Power relentlessly demolishes the conscience's prior defenses. Lesser writers would have feared alienating their audiences by implicating them in a systemic government failure to stop genocide. "Americans outside the executive branch were largely mute when it mattered," Power observes instead. All the weary reader can do is accept blame and vow to break the cycle. </p>
<p>When it mattered, Power did not allow her work to be twisted. Neocons and liberal hawks borrowed emotionally manipulative justifications to make the case for invading Iraq, such as avenging Saddam's earlier genocide of the Kurds. But Power bravely defended human rights from cynical misuse. "Oh dear," she wrote in a 2003 essay for <i>The New Republic</i>. "Here are the '90s, inverted: power without the liberalism, without the humility it requires in acknowledgment that none of us possesses absolute truths." </p>
<p>One of the people who felt similarly was Barack Obama. In the spring of 2005, Power got word that the new senator wanted to meet with her in Washington. Having been largely unimpressed by politicians' engagement with the book, Power walked into a Capitol Hill steakhouse expecting a perfunctory meeting. Four hours later, she and Obama were still mapping out the place of human rights in American strategy. Power would remain an Obama confidante for the next several years, helping him refine his vision for America's place in the world. </p>
<p>The first time I heard that story was the first time I took seriously the idea that Obama can change the world. Early in his political ascent, he allied himself with a writer who, in an important sense, already has. </p>
<p>But to what end? Power is now the National Security Council director for multilateral affairs and human rights, at the heart of the very foreign-policy establishment her book challenged. Already, human-rights activists have been disappointed by the administration's failure to place clear pressures on the <i>genocidaire </i>government of Sudan. "It is no secret that governments tend to have some difficulty turning to issues of this nature in a timely fashion," Power conceded in a White House Webcast on Darfur in November. Among the enduring achievements of <i>A Problem From Hell</i> is the solemn obligation it places on its author. </p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 18 Dec 2009 22:47:38 +0000148371 at http://prospect.orgSpencer AckermanA Glossary of Iraq Euphemismshttp://prospect.org/article/glossary-iraq-euphemisms
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>Christopher Hitchens, critiquing his friend Martin Amis, once casually <a href=" http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/09/hitchens.htm ">referred</a> to "the moral offense of euphemism." It's a beautiful and cutting phrase. The inability to call something what it is represents an opening salvo in an assault on the truth. An early acquiescence to the moral offense of euphemism is nothing less than the first stage of surrender to corruption. Whether the rot is manifested or merely intellectual is a distinction that will erode with time. </p>
<p>Few governments have relied more on euphemism than the Bush administration. Euphemism is different from spin. Spin puts the best face forward on a given policy; euphemism uses its opposite to describe itself. Hence the Clear Skies Initiative to weaken the Clean Air Act; the Freedom Agenda to describe military domination of the Middle East; or Enhanced Interrogation to discuss torture. </p>
<p>The Iraq War has been characterized by euphemism since its inception. The name "Operation Iraqi Freedom" denotes a foreign military occupation of Iraq endlessly described as liberation -- a term that, in practice, means the absolute opposite of any common-sense definition of "freedom." For over five years, foreign troops have enjoyed the legal right to kill any Iraqi whom commanders deem fit to kill; to search any house commanders deem fit to search; and to detain any Iraqi whom commanders deem fit to detain. This is, clearly, a condition Americans would never accept for themselves. Debate can reasonably occur over whether the war is worth it or whether the rules of engagement are appropriate. But no one can responsibly call this condition "freedom" for Iraqis. </p>
<p>Here's a guide to some of the most pronounced, and pernicious, euphemisms of the Iraq War. </p>
<p><b>GATED COMMUNITIES</b> </p>
<p>Any visitor to Baghdad notices them: the 10- to 15-foot concrete barriers protecting major installations and government buildings. They're covered with graffiti, political banners of yesteryear, and the occasional dab of paint. In 2007, the U.S. military began putting them around entire neighborhoods and limiting access to the enclosed enclaves. </p>
<p>The rationale was to separate sectarian combatants: for instance, throughout 2006 and into 2007, the Sunni Adhimiya neighborhood in eastern Baghdad was the scene of fierce fighting with the Shiite Mahdi Army from nearby Sadr City. So a wall went up to divide the two neighborhoods, and the military erected similar ones throughout Baghdad. The term for these concrete-barricaded areas? "Gated Communities," a phrase borrowed from placid American havens of golf, swimming clubs, and other affluent leisure-time activities. </p>
<p>The residents staged a protest, which Petraeus aide David Kilcullen considered an al-Qaeda in Iraq propaganda stunt rather than a legitimate expression of community outrage; the U.S. merely waited out the protests and kept building. Either way, not many in Adhimiya had time to make it to the links, even just to shoot nine holes. </p>
<p><b>CONCERNED LOCAL CITIZENS</b> </p>
<p>Let's say you had a bunch of insurgent fighters who 20 minutes ago were shooting at American soldiers and marines. Let's also say that through a combination of strategic calculation (they really didn't see much of a future for themselves under the foreign domination of anti-tobacco nazis like al-Qaeda in Iraq), inducement (lots of cash from U.S. commanders who'd rather not be shot at and blown up), and opportunities both present and future (today: becoming the neighborhood warlord; tomorrow: overthrowing the Shiite government!) they decide to stop shooting at the Americans. </p>
<p>You can call these guys a lot of things: well-motivated warlords; rational decision makers; allies of convenience. What you really shouldn't call them is "Concerned Local Citizens," a term that equates ferocious nationalist/sectarian killers with busybody retirees who hold bake sales to fund smoothing down the gravel at the playground before someone skins a knee. This LOL-worthy term was so egregious that even the military, in early 2008, changed it to ... </p>
<p><b>SONS OF IRAQ</b> </p>
<p>So these are the new-model Concerned Local Citizens. And admittedly, it's punchy. Indeed, according to Michael Gordon, <a href=" http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/magazine/03IRAQ-t.html ">writing</a> in <i>The New York Times Magazine</i>, "Concerned Local Citizens" translated into Arabic as the tonally dissonant "Worried Iraqis." </p>
<p>Of course, it also implies that the well-motivated warlords are deeper Iraqi patriots than the Iraqi army and police force that we're also sponsoring, so that's a downside. An Iraq War veteran who worked with the CLCs/Sons of Iraq recently came up with a better term on his blog for those who'd stop shooting at him if they'd get money out of it: <a ref=" http://armyofdude.blogspot.com/2008/07/enemies-with-benefits.html ">"Enemies with Benefits."</a> Alas, it appears not to have caught on yet. Euphemism works best when it's unintentionally humorless. </p>
<p><b>DAUGHTERS OF IRAQ</b> </p>
<p>And speaking of something that isn't funny, an offshoot of the Sons of Iraq program is -- wait for it -- the Daughters of Iraq. These Daughters are hired to guard set installations where women -- whom Iraqi culture won't allow men to frisk -- seek to enter. Given the recent onslaught of female suicide bombers, it's not exactly a program without a rationale. Unfortunately, it's also a recipe for getting women murdered -- either by terrorists, since the Daughters aren't even issued weapons to defend themselves; or by the charming men who feel compelled to violently drive home the lesson that security is a man's, man's, man's, man's, man's world. And this program is supposed to save lives? </p>
<p><b>BOTTOM-UP RECONCILIATION</b> </p>
<p>This one was a game of linguistic three-card monte. Throughout 2006 and early 2007, the principal political question was whether Sunnis and Shiites in Baghdad could achieve some sort of sectarian accord to stop the civil war. Indeed, the U.S. Congress made "reconciliation" -- the buzzword of the moment -- one of its 18 benchmarks to judge progress in Iraq. Alas, Iraqi national politics remains an cauldron of sectarian acrimony and obstinacy. </p>
<p>So what did the Bush administration do? It changed the meaning of reconciliation. Beginning in the summer of 2007, the White House, the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, and the U.S. military command in Iraq began talking about what they called "Bottom-Up Reconciliation," saying that the success of programs like the Concerned Local Citizens in volatile provinces like Anbar and Diyala proved that provincial hinterlands were "reconciling" with the national government -- even though a) the national government loathes the CLC/Sons of Iraq program; and b) that falsely implies that Iraqi politics, like American politics, allows public opinion to rise from the local to the national level to influence decision makers. Better still, it entirely elided the question of sectarian progress in Baghdad. This was perhaps the Bush administration's most successful euphemism. </p>
<p><b>OMENS OF PROSPERITY</b> </p>
<p>Here's something that might count as a breaking euphemism. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki last week ordered 50,000 Iraqi troops to conduct raids throughout Diyala province, which U.S. officials boasted of being increasingly pacified in 2007. The operation is called "Omens Of Prosperity." Because nothing says "prosperity" like 50,000 troops kicking down doors and arresting people. Oh, and the Iraqi government refused to allow any Sons of Iraq to participate in the operation. Talk about your Bottom-Up Reconciliation! </p>
<p><b>TIMETABLES</b> </p>
<p>Imagine you walk into an auto body shop where you left your car for a tune-up. You ask the man at the counter: When can I pick up my car? "Well," he replies, "I think that's a question best left to the discretion of the mechanics in the shop, don't you? After all, they're the ones hard at work fixing your car." </p>
<p>Wait, you say. Are you telling me you don't know when my car will be ready? I need to drive to -- "What I've always said," he interrupts, "is that setting an arbitrary deadline from the counter of this auto-body shop is the surest guarantee that your car will break down as soon as you drive it out of the shop. That won't just be a disaster for you, it will disrespect all the hard work the mechanics have been doing on your car." </p>
<p>You rub the bridge of your nose and ask: Can you even say how much this is going to cost me? "We think it's important to support our mechanics to the fullest. It would be irresponsible to speculate on the full price, since that's up to them, really, but having had a look at your finances, we're confident you can afford the total cost." </p>
<p>You might be tempted to throttle the man. And yet, somehow, this is John McCain's entire position on the war. "[A]djustments should be left to the discretion of Gen. Petraeus," he <a href=" http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110010585 ">wrote</a> in <i>The Wall Street Journal</i> last year with Joe Lieberman, "not forced on our troops by politicians in Washington with a 6,000-mile congressional screwdriver." </p>
<p>Some might be tempted to say that euphemisms are ultimately no big deal. But if you can't talk openly about what the war is -- and what the set strategy for it entails -- you engage in a self-deception that ensures nothing but continued catastrophe. Euphemism isn't merely an everyday sin. Applied to war, it's a mortal one. </p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 06 Aug 2008 16:22:20 +0000147375 at http://prospect.orgSpencer AckermanIron Man Versus the Imperialistshttp://prospect.org/article/iron-man-versus-imperialists
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>For any fan of the <i>Iron Man</i> comic books, Jon Favreau's new movie adaptation isn't just good, it's glorious. Robert Downey Jr. delivers an emotionally raw, ironic, and compelling portrait of brilliant billionaire defense mogul Tony Stark -- so compelling, in fact, that it's hard to believe the character has spent the last 45 years in a four-color world running around in a suit of armor battling villains named Thanos, Kang, and Zoga the Unthinkable.
</p>
<p>
Even more amazing is Favreau's refusal to lift <i>Iron Man</i> out of the context of America's current endless wars. Within the first five minutes, an IED disables a Humvee carrying Stark through Afghanistan's Kunar Province, setting off a series of events whereby a jihadist gang with dreams of overrunning Asia kidnaps our hero and forces him to use his weaponry against the innocent. That's a reasonable update to <i>Iron Man</i>'s origin myth, and on the screen it works fantastically well. </p>
<p>But what's missing in the movie is what has sustained the character for most of its history. Iron Man is a scathing critique of American imperialism. </p>
<p>Not that the comic started off with such a subversive point of view. When Iron Man debuted in 1963, the Marvel hero was designed as a Cold War allegory -- the all-powerful manifestation of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "arsenal of democracy." (A phrase that that appears in the movie.) Of course, in 1963, that meant that Iron Man's adventures were indicative of the Cold War mentality. The second page of the first Iron Man comic book features Stark showing off a new invention to a bewildered general as he beams, "<i>Now</i> do you believe that the transistors I've invented are capable of solving your problem in Vietnam?" Indeed, in the comic, Iron Man comes into being after Stark is taken captive during a trip through South Vietnam by a Chinese Communist warlord named Wong-Chu. Stark invents the Iron Man armor in order to "defeat this grinning, smirking, red terrorist!" Iron Man liberates a beleaguered South Vietnamese hamlet from the clutches of the Chinese ne'er-do-well and returns home, leaving his readers with the lesson that no foreign entanglement is too complex for the brilliant, benevolent, and armed-to-the-teeth American behemoth. </p>
<p>For years, <i>Iron Man</i>'s lesson was just that simple: Stark's keen technological mind represented the secret of American vitality; Iron Man's contribution to the nation's defense was an obligation that his gifts bestowed. America, under this Cold War logic, is powerful because America is inquisitive because America is free because America is good. Doesn't America have the right to defend itself? And shouldn't America use its endowment to the benefit of mankind? If so, doesn't that mean that when Wong-Chu comes to take over a South Vietnamese village, America would be irresponsible not to vanquish him with a souped-up transistor? In that vein, Iron Man's adversaries were fiends like the Red Barbarian, a Soviet general and spymaster who lived up to his nickname by bludgeoning his doltish subordinates with a ham hock. </p>
<p>But before long, the lessons of Vietnam sunk in on the comics juggernaut. Perhaps the idea that all the United States had to do was build bigger gadgets of disaster to use on a complicated world was hopelessly flawed. Perhaps <i>Iron Man</i> was symptomatic of the rot. Perhaps, by holding up a mirror to U.S. policies, <i>Iron Man</i> could become a vehicle for cleansing the country of its Cold War hang-ups. Marvel set to work reworking the character and its themes. </p>
<p>A problem confronted the company, though. Iron Man is a superhero. Cold-War product or not, Marvel couldn't very well turn him into a villain. Writers in the 1970s and 1980s solved the problem in two creative ways. First, the comic adopted the New Left's structural critique of Vietnam -- the war was the inevitable product of a systemic belief in unrestricted capitalism, American exceptionalism, and racism -- by making Stark Industries an enemy of poor Tony Stark, who had unleashed malevolent forces he couldn't control. Thus Iron Man's nemesis became a black-mirror version of himself: the ruthless metal juggernaut (another metal-suit weapon) subtly named Iron Monger, controlled by rival defense-industry bloodsucker Obadiah Stane. More cleverly, Stark's best friend Jim Rhodes became a second Iron Man -- but one sent into a paranoid frenzy of destruction by the armor's inability to interface properly with his brain. Rhodes's secret identity? War Machine. </p>
<p>The second way Marvel subtly readjusted Iron Man for America's post-Vietnam sensibilities was to reveal that the reason Stark could control neither his company nor his relationships was that he couldn't control himself. Stark's booze-soaked, womanizing lifestyle was cleverly reinterpreted as rampant alcoholism and self-loathing. His drive to save the world was nothing more than a martyr complex born of a callow solipsism. It was a brilliant maneuver by the writers. <i>Iron Man</i> began to ask America: Would you trust such unfettered, unaccountable power to someone this messed up? The introduction of War Machine took the critique a step further, showing that the very act of donning the armor <i>makes</i> you messed up. Some exercises of power are too dangerous to be left in the hands of one man. The writers never turned Iron Man into a villain -- that would have been the easy way out. Instead they presented a fascinating character study, a compelling Cold War critique, a subtle plea for liberal internationalism, and a defense of a series of theses presented to the world in America's founding documents. It helps that Iron Man also blows stuff up. </p>
<p>Other recent updates to the Stark/Iron Man story have jettisoned the Cold War element but deepened the dynamic established in the 1970s. In <i>Extremis</i>, a reboot of the franchise during the current Bush era, Warren Ellis, one of the most talented comic-book writers currently working, has Stark unable to answer the question "What is the Iron Man armor <i>for</i>, Tony?" A left-wing filmmaker, dismissive of Stark's protestations that he's more than a weapons merchant, asks, "Do you think they have your painkilling drug pumps in Iraq? Do you think an Afghan kid with his arms blown off by a landmine is remotely impressed by an Iron Man suit?" Tony Stark is meant to be read as a tragic figure. He is one of the smartest men alive, yet he cannot think his way out of the traps his genius constructs for him. And so he blunders, again and again, into a hell of unintended consequences. </p>
<p>Nowhere is that allegory more explicit than in "Civil War," Marvel's 2006-2007 epic superhero-versus-superhero crossover series. (See Julian Sanchez's "<a href="http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_revolt_of_the_comic_boooks">The Revolt of The Comic Books</a>," in the November issue of the <i>Prospect</i>.) Iron Man's zealous advocacy of registering superheroes with the government yields a violent crisis that kills the hero Goliath, Iron Man's guileless friend Happy Hogan, and, finally, Captain America. It also yields Stark unfathomable political power. But the story ends with Iron Man emotionally confessing to Captain America's dead body that -- since the terrible price of the war is now on display -- "it wasn't worth it." Iron Man, who represents an imperial America, can only win Pyrrhic victories. </p>
<p>Favreau's movie can't go that far. Structurally speaking, Iron Man needs to be developed as a character before he can be deconstructed and subverted, and that's a challenge too difficult for the first movie of the inevitable franchise. (Rhodes, brilliantly portrayed by Terrence Howard, all but promises a War Machine-heavy sequel by gazing longingly at a prototype Iron Man 3.0 armor and whispering, "Next time, baby.") It's also possible that, even after five agonizing years of the Iraq War, a summer blockbuster isn't prepared to say that not only is its action hero corrupt, he's corrupt because <i>America</i> has become corrupt. </p>
<p>The movie inches up to the comic-book critique, however. Obadiah Stane, the cigar-chomping villain played by Jeff Bridges, conspires to kill Stark and sell Stark Industries' weapons to terrorists. His solution to the unanticipated problem of Iron Man is, as in the comic books, to become Iron Monger (though the movie never uses that name). Similarly, when Stark sees that his company has made him little more than a playboy version of infamous black-market arms merchant Viktor Bout, his answer is to both get out of the weapons trade and to use Iron Man to right Stark Industries' wrongs. When asked by his personal assistant/love interest Pepper Potts why he's doing something that will most likely get him killed, Stark replies, plaintively but with conviction, "I finally know what I have to do, and I know in my heart that it's right." </p>
<p>Spoken like a true imperialist. Heroism, when applied to foreign policy, is a moral vanity that usually prescribes a cure more corrosive than the disease it confronts. It will always be good celluloid for Iron Man to incinerate terrorists who -- living out their own imperial perversions -- overrun villages full of innocents. But the real world does not contain magic suits that kill the bad guys without harming the civilians and let the good guy fly away without a scratch on him. In that world, the actual answer to the Iron Man complex is one of two things. America either needs to submit the Iron Man armor to a series of institutions to govern its just use, or it needs to take off the suit once and for all.</p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 15 May 2008 23:19:17 +0000147204 at http://prospect.orgSpencer AckermanThe Obama Doctrinehttp://prospect.org/article/obama-doctrine
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><a href="http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles/election_08"><img vspace="5" hspace="10" align="left" alt="" src="/galleries/img_articles/Elec08_MedButton.JPG" /></a></p>
<p>When Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama met in California for the Jan. 31 debate, their back-and-forth resembled their many previous encounters, with the Democratic presidential hopefuls scrambling for the small policy yardage between them. And then Obama said something about the Iraq War that wasn't incremental at all. "I don't want to just end the war," he said, "but I want to end the mind-set that got us into war in the first place." </p>
<p>Until this point in the primaries, Clinton and Obama had sounded very similar on this issue. Despite their differences in the past (Obama opposed the war, while Clinton voted for it), both were calling for major troop withdrawals, with some residual force left behind to hedge against catastrophe. But Obama's concise declaration of intent at the debate upended this assumption. Clinton stumbled to find a counterargument, eventually saying her vote in October 2002 "was not authority for a pre-emptive war." Then she questioned Obama's ability to lead, saying that the Democratic nominee must have "the necessary credentials and gravitas for commander in chief." </p>
<p>If Clinton's response on Iraq sounds familiar, that's because it's structurally identical to the defensive crouch John Kerry assumed in 2004: Voting against the war wasn't a mistake; the mistakes were all George W. Bush's, and bringing the war to a responsible conclusion requires a wise man or woman with military credibility. In that debate, Obama offered an alternative path. Ending the war is only the first step. After we're out of Iraq, a corrosive mind-set will still be infecting the foreign-policy establishment and the body politic. That rot must be eliminated. </p>
<p>Obama is offering the most sweeping liberal foreign-policy critique we've heard from a serious presidential contender in decades. It cuts to the heart of traditional Democratic timidity. "It's time to reject the counsel that says the American people would rather have someone who is strong and wrong than someone who is weak and right," Obama said in a January speech. "It's time to say that we are the party that is going to be strong and right." (The Democrat who counseled that Americans wanted someone strong and wrong, not weak and right? That was Bill Clinton in 2002.) </p>
<p>But to understand what Obama is proposing, it's important to ask: What, exactly, is the mind-set that led to the war? What will it mean to end it? And what will take its place? </p>
<p>To answer these questions, I spoke at length with Obama's foreign-policy brain trust, the advisers who will craft and implement a new global strategy if he wins the nomination and the general election. They envision a doctrine that first ends the politics of fear and then moves beyond a hollow, sloganeering "democracy promotion" agenda in favor of "dignity promotion," to fix the conditions of misery that breed anti-Americanism and prevent liberty, justice, and prosperity from taking root. An inextricable part of that doctrine is a relentless and thorough destruction of al-Qaeda. Is this hawkish? Is this dovish? It's both and neither -- an overhaul not just of our foreign policy but of how we think about foreign policy. And it might just be the future of American global leadership. </p>
<p></p><center>***</center>
<p>When considering any presidential hopeful's foreign-policy promises, it's important to remember that what candidates say is, at best, an imperfect guide to their actions in office. What proves to be a more reliable indicator of presidential behavior is a candidate's roster of advisers. (If the press had paid better attention, the country would have seen through Bush's pitch about a humble foreign policy and realized that many of his advisers, including Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, were conspiracy-minded warmongers.) Obama's foreign-policy advisers come from diverse backgrounds. They are former aides to Democratic mandarins like Tom Daschle and Lee Hamilton (Denis McDonough and Ben Rhodes, respectively); veterans of the Clinton administration's left flank (Tony Lake and Susan Rice); a human-rights advocate who helped write the Army's and Marine Corps' much-lauded counterinsurgency field manual (Sarah Sewall); a retired general who helped run the air war during the invasion of Iraq (Scott Gration); and a former journalist who revolutionized the study of U.S. foreign policy (Samantha Power). Yet they form a committed, intellectually coherent, and surprisingly united foreign-affairs team. (Shortly before this piece went to press, Power resigned from the campaign after making an intemperate remark to a reporter.) </p>
<p>They also share a formative experience with each other and with Obama. Each opposed the Iraq War at a time when doing so was derided by their colleagues, by journalists, and by the foreign-policy establishment. Each did so because they understood that the invasion and occupation ran counter to the goal of destroying al-Qaeda. And each bore the frustration of endless lectures on their lack of so-called seriousness from those who suffered from strategic myopia. </p>
<p>"There is a popular notion that Democrats have to try to appear like Republicans to pass some test on national security. The fact that that's still the case after Iraq is absurd," says one of Obama's closest advisers. "So you break from that orthodoxy and say 'I don't care if the Republicans attack me because I'm willing to meet with the leadership in Iran. We haven't for 25 years, and it's not gotten us anywhere.'" </p>
<p>Most of the members of Obama's foreign-policy team expressed frustration that they had taken a well-considered and seemingly anodyne position on Iraq and suffered for it. Obama had something similar happen to him in the spring and summer of 2007. He was attacked from the left <i>and</i> the right for saying three things that should not have been controversial: that if he had actionable intelligence on the whereabouts of al-Qaeda's leadership in Pakistan but no cooperation from the Pakistani government, he would take out the jihadists; that he wouldn't use nuclear weapons on terrorist training camps; and that he would be willing to meet with leaders of rogue states in his first year as president. "No one [of Obama's critics] had thought through the policy because that was the quote-unquote naïve and weak position, so they said it was a bad position to take," recalls Ben Rhodes, the adviser who writes Obama's foreign-policy speeches. "And it was a seminal moment, because Obama himself said, 'No, I'm right about this!'" </p>
<p>Instead of backing down, Obama asked his foreign-policy team to double down. Rhodes wrote a speech that Obama delivered at DePaul University on Oct. 2, which criticized the boundaries of acceptable discourse set by the same establishment that backed the war. "This election is about ending the Iraq War, but even more it's about moving beyond it. And we're not going to be safe in a world of unconventional threats with the same old conventional thinking that got us into Iraq," Obama said. One of his advisers, recalling the fallout from Obama's comments about pursuing al-Qaeda in Pakistan, says, "He takes policy positions that are a break from both rigid orthodoxy and the Bush administration. And everyone says it's a gaffe! That just encapsulates everything that's wrong about the foreign-policy debate in Washington and in Democratic politics." </p>
<p>The Obama foreign-policy team describes it as "the politics of fear," a phrase most advisers used unprompted in our conversations. "For a long time we've not seen much creative thinking from Dems on national security, because, out of fear, we want to be a little different from the Republicans but not too different, out of fear of being labeled weak or indecisive," another top adviser says. Identifying that fear as the accelerant of the Iraq War mind-set is the first step to a new and innovative foreign policy. John Kerry was not able to argue for fundamental change in foreign policy because he was consumed by that very political fear. Obama's admonition to Democrats is much like Pope John Paul II's to the Gdansk shipyard strikers -- first, be not afraid. </p>
<p></p><center>***</center>
<p>Like Obama, his defense advisers have supplemented their American views with the perspectives of outsiders. Gen. Scott Gration, a retired Air Force jet pilot, says hello to me over the phone in Swahili. He learned about the crushing misery of the world's poor by growing up in Congo, where his parents were missionaries. After the violence following Congolese independence in 1960, Gration had an experience few Americans ever will: He became a refugee. "We lost everything we owned, and what we took with us, they confiscated," he remembers. </p>
<p>Sarah Sewall, a Harvard professor and another of Obama's closest advisers, also knows about stepping outside of her comfort zone. A longtime human-rights advocate with the disarmament organization, the Council for a Livable World, Sewall found herself in 2005 and 2006 with an unlikely partner: Gen. David Petraeus. He and two colleagues were rewriting the Army and Marine field manual for counterinsurgency and wanted Sewall's input on how to create a more just, humane, and successful doctrine. For agreeing to help, she was attacked by some on the left. "Should a human-rights center at the nation's most prestigious university be collaborating with the top U.S. general in Iraq in designing the counterinsurgency doctrine behind the current military surge?" Tom Hayden wrote online in <i>The Huffington Post</i>. </p>
<p>Sewall's involvement may have lost her some influence within the academic left, but she has become a hero to the military's growing circle of counterinsurgency theorist-practitioners. "Her impact on the thinking about the war and the conduct of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has been significant and not without cost," says Army Lt. Col. John Nagl, one of the counterinsurgency community's luminaries. "She has shown, in my eyes, great moral courage. I think Senator Obama is listening to someone who has thought long and hard about the use of force and who understands the kinds of wars we're fighting today." </p>
<p>This ability to see the world from different perspectives informs what the Obama team hopes will replace the Iraq War mind-set: something they call dignity promotion. "I don't think anyone in the foreign-policy community has as much an appreciation of the value of dignity as Obama does," says Samantha Power, a former key aide and author of the groundbreaking study of U.S. foreign policy and genocide, <i>A Problem From Hell</i>. "Dignity is a way to unite a lot of different strands [of foreign-policy thinking]," she says. "If you start with that, it explains why it's not enough to spend $3 billion on refugee camps in Darfur, because the way those people are living is not the way they want to live. It's not a human way to live. It's graceless -- an affront to your sense of dignity." </p>
<p>During Bush's second term, a strange disconnect has arisen in liberal foreign-policy circles in response to the president's so-called "freedom agenda." Some liberals, like Matthew Yglesias in his book <i>Heads In The Sand</i>, note the insincerity of the administration's stated goal of exporting democracy. Bush, they observe, only targets for democratization countries that challenge American hegemony. Other liberal foreign-policy types, such as Thomas Carothers and Marina Ottaway of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, insist the administration is sincere but too focused on elections without supporting the civil-society institutions that sustain democracy. Still others, like Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch, contend that a focus on democracy in the developing world without privileging the protection of civil and political rights is a recipe for a dangerous illiberalism. </p>
<p>What's typically neglected in these arguments is the simple insight that democracy does not fill stomachs, alleviate malaria, or protect neighborhoods from marauding bands of militiamen. Democracy, in other words, is valuable to people insofar as it allows them first to meet their basic needs. It is much harder to provide that sense of dignity than to hold an election in Baghdad or Gaza and declare oneself shocked when illiberal forces triumph. "Look at why the baddies win these elections," Power says. "It's because [populations are] living in climates of fear." U.S. policy, she continues, should be "about meeting people where they're at. Their fears of going hungry, or of the thug on the street. That's the swamp that needs draining. If we're to compete with extremism, we have to be able to provide these things that we're not [providing]." </p>
<p>This is why, Obama's advisers argue, national security depends in large part on dignity promotion. Without it, the U.S. will never be able to destroy al-Qaeda. Extremists will forever be able to demagogue conditions of misery, making continued U.S. involvement in asymmetric warfare an increasingly counterproductive exercise -- because killing one terrorist creates five more in his place. "It's about attacking pools of potential terrorism around the globe," Gration says. "Look at Africa, with 900 million people, half of whom are under 18. I'm concerned that unless you start creating jobs and livelihoods we will have real big problems on our hands in ten to fifteen years." </p>
<p>Obama sees this as more than a global charity program; it is the anvil against which he can bring down the hammer on al-Qaeda. "He took many of the [counterinsurgency] principles -- the paradoxes, like how sometimes you're less secure the more force is used -- and looked at it from a more strategic perspective," Sewall says. "His policies deal with root causes but do not misconstrue root causes as a simple fix. He recognizes that you need to pursue a parallel anti-terrorism [course] in its traditional form along with this transformed approach to foreign policy." Not for nothing has Obama received private advice or public support from experts like former Clinton and Bush counterterrorism advisers Richard Clarke and Rand Beers, and John Brennan, the first chief of the National Counterterrorism Center. </p>
<p>The Obama foreign-affairs brain trust balks at the suggestion that what it's proposing is radical. "He said we'd take out al-Qaeda's senior leadership in the Pakistani tribal areas if Pakistan will not. That's not, to me, a revolutionary policy," Rhodes says. "Watching him get attacked on the right is absurd. You've got guys who argued for a massive invasion and occupation of a country that had nothing to do with 9-11 criticizing him for advocating the use of highly targeted force to kill Osama bin Laden!" </p>
<p>Rhodes is referring, of course, to John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, who recently asked of Obama, "Will we risk the confused leadership of an inexperienced candidate who once suggested invading our ally, Pakistan?" It's no secret that McCain, a war hero who is to the right of Bush when it comes to Iraq, hopes to make this a foreign-policy election. Conventional wisdom holds this would give him an advantage over Obama. A Feb. 28 Pew Research Center poll found 43 percent of respondents believe Obama is "not tough enough" on foreign policy. Thirty-nine percent believe Obama's foreign policy is "just right," while 47 percent say the same of McCain. </p>
<p>Even so, Obama's foreign-policy advisers are thrilled at the prospect of facing McCain. Had the GOP nomination gone to Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee, politicians who don't particularly care about foreign policy, an Obama victory would not provide a mandate for the sweeping foreign-affairs overhaul his campaign proposes. November's election could be, for the first time in a very long time, a choice between two radically different visions of U.S. global engagement. "We <i>want</i> to have this debate with John McCain," a close Obama adviser says. "[Obama] will offer this clear contrast." </p>
<p>Susan Rice, an assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration and one of the few foreign-policy-establishment luminaries to sign on with Obama, explains what's at stake: "After eight years of George Bush, when the next president puts his or her hand on the Bible to be sworn in, the U.S. is going to get one brief second look [from the world] about whether the U.S. truly learned to change from its past mistakes, recent and historic, and whether we're again the kind of America people look to lead in a constructive fashion, or whether we're hopeless. In my opinion, they'll look at McCain and decide we're trapped in our old mistakes." </p>
<p>Of course, it remains to be seen how <i>voters</i> might look at an Obama-McCain race. "The important distinction will be, does Obama come across as saying he wants to make a break with the foreign policy of the last seven years, or does it sound like he'll take foreign policy in a fundamentally different direction than that of the last twenty, thirty, fifty years?" says Guy Molyneux, a Democratic pollster with Peter D. Hart Associates. Americans are eager to put the Bush doctrine behind them, Molyneux says, but there's a danger that voters will see Obama as a "young guy who's less experienced but sounds like he's taking off in a new direction." </p>
<p></p><center>***</center>
<p>In his focus on the importance of dignity in our policy toward the developing world, Obama sounds quite a bit like John F. Kennedy, who knitted together an argument for engagement with the "non-aligned" world and began the tradition of development assistance as a foreign-policy goal. However, Kennedy's basic foreign policy continued along the Cold War lines that had been laid down during the Truman administration. </p>
<p>Democratic presidential candidates since Kennedy have either downplayed foreign policy or simply argued for more competence in its execution, with two major exceptions: George McGovern in 1972 and Jimmy Carter in 1976. In the popular imagination, based on the "Come home, America" line from his nomination acceptance speech, McGovern pivoted from a striking critique of the immorality of the Vietnam War to an indictment of U.S. involvement abroad. But McGovern purposefully left this broad criticism out of most of his campaign. "I concentrated on Vietnam," McGovern says in a phone interview, "because I thought it would be difficult to sell a comprehensive rewriting of American foreign policy." Carter is a more ambiguous case. In the wake of Watergate, he made a full-spectrum argument against the Washington establishment. Rethinking foreign policy was a part of that, and his aide Hamilton Jordan remarked, "If, after the inauguration, you find Cy Vance as secretary of state and Zbigniew Brzezinski as head of national security, then I would say we failed." Both men, of course, received precisely those posts. </p>
<p>Obama is doing something braver with foreign policy than McGovern or Carter. Much, of course, could go wrong. Right-wing demagogues are already implying Obama is a Muslim terrorist. Conservatives are using Obama's argument about the inextricability of international prosperity and U.S. national security to portray him as a "post-American globalist." Jewish right-wingers in the U.S. have begun a smear campaign not just about Obama, but also about Power, as writers for <i>Commentary</i> and <i>National Review</i> have baselessly implied that she is an anti-Semite. Expect more of this for the duration of the primary season, and, if Obama wins, beyond. </p>
<p>If he wins in the general election, he will face a crush of foreign-policy problems so enormous that they risk overwhelming even the most competent, experienced national-security team. Iraq is, of course, a nightmare, and al-Qaeda is not just sitting still in its Pakistani safe haven. To propose rebooting U.S. foreign policy now is, to say the least, ambitious. Many military leaders consider Obama an unknown quantity. At a recent talk, <i>Washington Post</i> correspondent Thomas Ricks said that officers and soldiers serving in Iraq thought that McCain and Clinton would both pursue a foreign-policy commensurate with Bush's, but Obama left them puzzled. Once in office, Obama might feel compelled to turn his back on the critique he makes on the trail. </p>
<p>But while the doubts about Obama contain fair points, they also, to a certain degree, reflect a triumph of the Iraq War mind-set. Why <i>not</i> demand the destruction of al-Qaeda? Why <i>not</i> pursue the enlightened global leadership promised by liberal internationalism? Why <i>not</i> abandon fear? What <i>is</i> it we have to fear, exactly? </p>
<p>"He goes back to Roosevelt," Power says. "Freedom from fear and freedom from want. What if we actually offered that? What if we delivered that in the developing world? That would be a <i>transformative</i> agenda for us." The end of the Iraq War mind-set, it turns out, may be the beginning of America's reacquaintance with its best traditions.</p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 19 Mar 2008 17:01:34 +0000147072 at http://prospect.orgSpencer AckermanFive Years Laterhttp://prospect.org/article/five-years-later
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>The Pentagon sponsored a conference call Monday with a Air Force colonel named Donald Bacon in Baghdad, who presented what he characterized as the findings of a major effort to understand al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the United State's most implacable enemy in the war. These are the irreconcilables, the extremists, the bloodthirsty, the relentless; the ones who the president has promised will follow us home if they aren't defeated. The U.S. military command and the Bush administration have explained away AQI's tiny percentage within the Sunni insurgency by saying it is disproportionately dangerous, accounting for most of the suicide bombings and high-profile catastrophic attacks. And it's explained away the tiny proportion of foreigners within the mostly-Iraqi AQI by saying that the foreigners are both the organization's leadership and its suicide-bomber cadre. </p>
<p>So now the U.S. military command in Iraq has put together a new profile of the foreign cohort within AQI. It's based on debriefings of 48 foreign members of AQI currently in U.S. custody. In other words, Multinational Force-Iraq (MNF-I), the proper name for the U.S. military leadership, wanted to spread the word about what its most-implacable foe really is. Here is what that enemy looks like. I'll call him Mr. AQI. </p>
<p>Mr. AQI is a man in his early-to-mid 20s. Chances are he came to Iraq from either north Africa or Saudi Arabia. He's single. He's lower-middle class and has some high school experience, but probably not a diploma. To earn his wages he worked in construction or maybe drove a taxi. Mr. AQI probably didn't have any significant military experience prior to joining AQI. His relationship with his dad isn't so great. And while he's been religious for as long as he can remember, he wasn't, you know, a nut about it. </p>
<p>So what brought Mr. AQI to Iraq? At the mosque, he met a man who could tell Mr. AQI just wanted to belong to something. That man told Mr. AQI he had something Mr. AQI needed to see. Very often, according to Colonel Bacon, it was an image from Abu Ghraib. Or it was a spliced-together propaganda film of Americans killing or abusing Iraqis. The narrative that weighed heavily on Mr. AQI, Colonel Bacon said, was that it was his "religious duty go to Iraq," where he would serve as "an avenger of abused Iraqs." </p>
<p>But Iraq wasn't what he thought it would be. Mr. AQI wasn't an infantryman, where he'd bravely stand and fight Americans, he was pressured into being a suicide bomber. Nor were his targets the Americans he wanted to hit -- they were the Iraqis he came to avenge. According to Colonel Bacon, in some cases, Mr. AQI was happy to be in American custody, where he would no longer cause Iraq any more pain. </p>
<p>Let that sink in for a moment. For Mr. AQI has a lesson for us. Counterfactual conditionals are always problematic, but in all likelihood, according to MNF-I's own profile, if the United States. were not in Iraq, Mr. AQI would be back in his taxi in Algiers or Jedda. Were it not for Abu Ghraib -- which, of course, never would have happened had we not invaded -- Mr. AQI would never have felt that it was his religious duty to kill Americans. And were it not for the war, thousands of Americans and possibly hundreds of thousands of Iraqis would be alive, right now, and all without a propaganda windfall that spikes terrorist recruitment for the extremist lurking around the mosque trying to generate new Mr. AQIs. And what is true of our foreign-born Mr. AQI is all the more true of the perhaps 95 percent of AQI that's Iraqi Sunni. Not one of them would have any reason to be a member of AQI if George Bush did not give him one. </p>
<p>I asked Colonel Bacon if Mr. AQI was an evildoer or if he was brainwashed; and then whether Mr. AQI would be blowing up Bangor if he wasn't blowing up Baghdad. Both were unfair questions, as they put a military officer into the crosshairs of an acrimonious debate that is properly debated by civilians. "No doubt some are more ideological than others," he told me, but his impression from the debriefings that they were primarily "looking for friendship, a place to be respected and counted. [That's] more of the driving force than anything else. And they're the most ideological [cohort] of AQI, more than the Iraqis." He added that "some could" come to the U.S. and "clearly al-Qaeda writ large would like to do that." </p>
<p>So I am sorry, Colonel Bacon. It wasn't right of me to ask those questions. But the evidence that you provided more than demonstrates that AQI is a nightmare of our own miscalculated creation. Imagine if we had not invaded Iraq but instead had devoted ourselves, five years ago to the promotion of dignity, justice and liberty to the millions of potential (and actual) Mr. AQIs around the greater Middle East. Mr. AQI desires to belong to something. He would have belonged -- not necessarily but quite possibly -- to the United States. </p>
<p>There are many horrors of the war, primarily the destroyed lives of Americans and Iraqis. But this is the strategic horror of the war. The good news is that there is a way to stop the generation of Mr. AQIs, both Iraqi and foreign. It is the most important counterterrorism operation of all. Stop this illegal, immoral, unjust, disastrous war. </p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 19 Mar 2008 15:07:08 +0000147067 at http://prospect.orgSpencer AckermanWireTAP: A Dialogue about <em>The Wire</em> (Episode 10)http://prospect.org/article/wiretap-dialogue-about-wire-episode-10
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>Throughout the fifth and final season of HBO's groundbreaking drama, <a href="http://www.hbo.com/thewire/"><i>The Wire</i></a>, we've featured an ongoing discussion of the series with <i>TAP Online</i> writers. This week, we chat about episode ten -- the final episode of the season and the series. (If you haven't been reading, you can catch up on our discussions of <a href="../../cs/articles?article=wiretap1">episodes one, two and three</a>, <a href="../../cs/articles?article=wiretap2">episodes four, five and six</a>, and <a href="http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=wiretap3">episodes seven, eight and nine</a>.) <i>--The Editors</i></p>
<p><b>Ann Friedman:</b> Well, now that it's all wrapped up with a neat little bow, I have to say that the series finale was a bit of a letdown -- especially after those phenomenal episodes eight and nine.</p>
<p>We all know how jaded David Simon is about the state of journalism, but it seemed completely unrealistic that, presented with the evidence, the higher-ups at the paper would turn their heads and ignore Templeton's plagiarism. Their defense of Templeton made sense up until this last episode -- until Gus presumably laid out all the evidence. But even with a Pulitzer on the line, I find it pretty unbelievable that they would just let it all stand. I know they're enemy No. 1 to Simon, but come on. And screwing Alma over just seemed excessive. </p>
<p>I thought the overt parallel scenes at the end of the episode were too heavy-handed. Sidnor repeating, line for line, McNulty's initial conversation with Judge Phelan from season one? Michael aping Omar's stickup boy routine? Bunk and Kima playing out the old Bunk/McNulty dynamic? Dukie as the new Bubs? It's not that these scenes are unbelievable -- on the contrary. But, especially given the way the sequence was shot and edited, it all felt a bit overdone. And speaking of overdone, what was with the series of postcard shots of Baltimore? Yikes. </p>
<p>That said, I really liked the scene where Marlo reprises Stringer Bell's attempts to be a straight businessman. His humiliating confrontation with the corner boys was particularly good. It appears he ended up with a fate worse than (or just as bad as) the years he was about to get in prison.</p>
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<p><b>Spencer Ackerman:</b> I'm just going to say it: the finale was perfect. I'll spot David Simon a couple of indulgences in terms of one-for-one substitutions. They're a) fun for the viewers -- Ann, I simply don't believe that you didn't get a chill up your spine when you saw Michael rob Rim Source II with a shotgun -- and b) in support of the main point that Nothing Ever Changes. Cedric Daniels <i>has</i> to give up the commissionership because if he doesn't, he'll end up in a rear-guard battle with City Hall over who eats the illegal wiretap -- a battle that will ruin Ronnie, Marla, and others, and prevent him from actually making the changes he wants to make -- and all for, at the end of the day, pride masquerading as principle. In season one, Marla looks out at the rigged game and tells Cedric, "You cannot lose if you do not play." Cedric finally agreed. It's a good life outside the game. But the game goes on. </p>
<p>Same goes for Templeton's Pulitzer. Yes, it's realistic that frauds don't get caught, and more realistic still that the power-hungry or reputation-crazed protect the frauds, or choose not to believe the evidence demonstrating their fraudulence. Was credulity a <i>little</i> strained? Sure. But let's draw a parallel for a moment. </p>
<p>In 1986, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons launch a 12-issue comic book called <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmen"><i>Watchmen</i></a>. Up until <i>Watchmen</i>, super hero comic books are fairly straight-forward morality tales. <i>Watchmen</i> is too sprawling and complex to describe here, but suffice it to say that its lesson -- completely unfamiliar in comic books up to this point -- is that being yourself to be a super hero is indicative of a very deep-seated pathology. It is universally acclaimed as the dawn of comic-book realism, and rightfully so. How does it end? With the teleportation of a giant genetically-engineered monster that destroys New York City. </p>
<p>The point is that a show as groundbreaking, revolutionary and multidimensional as <i>The Wire</i> can afford, as Ronnie puts it, to occasionally color outside the lines, especially if the ultimate portrait is as vivid, powerful and true as what David Simon has presented.</p>
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<p><b>Ezra Klein:</b> Putting aside the newsroom for a second, I also appreciated the finale. Though there were various subplots that needed resolution, the series itself wasn't working towards any kind of finish. Baltimore, after all, goes on -- as do its people, and its pathologies, and its poverty -- even if David Simon's creation doesn't. Given that, all the finale could not disappoint. And it didn't disappoint. </p>
<p>Take the threads separately. The newsroom was undeniably the weakest. Templeton is not only victorious, but a Pulitzer-prize winner? Alma is kicked into Siberia? Gus is demoted to copy? If Templeton's stories could indeed unravel, then Gus could have simply helped them come apart. If the editors were really the Machiavellian careerists Simon portrayed them as, they would have eagerly tossed Templeton under the bus. Instead, the facts of the plot's outcome almost point towards the opposite interpretation: That Gus really didn't have the goods; that Templeton's work was basically solid, if a bit embellished; and that the series on the homeless actually achieved a bit of transcendence. In that light, Gus's trajectory is, oddly, a perfect parallel of Simon's actual experience: He's so blinded by his own vendetta, so certain that the evidence he's amassed and the slights he's recorded amount to a damning case, that he lays out his argument and assumes everyone will gape in shock and horror, but in reality, few are actually convinced. </p>
<p>The serial killer subplot, however, ended more successfully. The whole thing was a farce, to be sure, but its resolution was folded effectively into <i>The Wire</i>'s broader exploration of broken institutions and the incentives that pervert would be reformers. The exposure of McNulty's deception helped show how corrupted every character had become. Carcetti, of course, is corrupted by his hunt for power. Rawls by his ache for advancement. But even Daniels -- Daniels the pure and the good -- is corrupted, as he can't harm the careers of those he loves. Indeed, the final montage suggests that he may have used a bit of his leverage to help secure Pearlman a judgeship. </p>
<p>And then there's Marlo. The whole of <i>The Wire</i> was summed up in his slightly panicked escape from the highrise party, his visceral need to go back to the corner he knew so well, to find meaning and recognition in the only realm he knows how to dominate. Watching Marlo wander weak and awed through the crowd of businessmen and influentials was a powerful reminder of how few options he ever really had. At the end of the day, he may have money, but he's got no education, no white collar savvy, and no respect in the wider world. Levy will bleed him dry and toss him back to the streets. Watching Marlo, it was hard not to think of Bodie going to Philadelphia to pick up some product and muttering to himself, "damn, why would anyone ever want to leave Baltimore?" If you can't imagine why you'd ever want to escape a broken and destroyed landscape like inner city Baltimore, the odds are pretty damn good that you won't. And if your fate, then, is to be forever trapped on the corners, than you will fight for recognition and meaning and importance in the only way you know how. Viciously. Just as the politicians do, just as the police commissioners do, just as the editors do. You'll use guns, of course, not press conferences and Pulitzers, but the motivation will be the same. It's all the same game. At the end of the day, we all want our corners. It's just that Marlo's corner and Carcetti's corner are in very different zip codes, and dominance requires a different set of tricks.</p>
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<p><b>Matt Yglesias:</b> On the parallels, I liked the Sidnor scene but wasn't thrilled with the Michael one. Sidnor was played as something stylized and symbolic -- the literal repetition of an earlier scene. Michael by contrast seemed a little leaden -- like maybe he should have had some token differences, used a pistol instead of a shotgun, I dunno. </p>
<p>Re: Templeton, I'm basically with Spencer. </p>
<p>Still, loose ends ... Carcetti's running for governor on this bullshit -- where's the GOP incumbent and his buddy in the US Attorney's office sniffing around the massive cover-up at the heart of his campaign? And maybe Gus or Alma wants to sell the story to <i>The Washington Post</i>? </p>
<p>But whatever. The heart of the story is on the streets and the Marlo arc wound up doing what I thought it couldn't, and really adding something to what we saw in the rise and fall of Stringer and Avon.</p>
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<p><b>Ezra Klein:</b> To make a follow-up point on that, the scene of Chris hanging with Wee-bey in prison was powerful, and so was Avon's willingness to deal with Marlo. Both were reminders that, whatever our feelings, the Stanfield gang was just the successor to the Barksdale organization. Simon made us love Avon and Stringer with a ferocity equal to our hatred for Marlo. And so it was easy to forget that they laid down their bodies, that they had their enforcers. Marlo's men tortured and killed Butchie, but Stringer personally oversaw not only the torture of Omar's lover and partner Brandon, but the mutilation and public display of his corpse. Avon recognized their basic equivalence, as did Wee-bey, as did Simon.</p>
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<p><b>Sam Rosenfeld:</b> Matt said that "the Marlo arc wound up doing what I thought it couldn't, and really adding something to what we saw in the rise and fall of Stringer and Avon." It's true, and I will ask because it hasn't been mentioned yet, did anyone else gasp and laugh out loud like I did at Slim Charles's prompt dispatching of that tin-pot would-be kingpin Cheese? It was priceless. Cheese gets himself a thrilling little monologue of nihilist gangster bravado that goes on long enough for you to think "is <i>this</i> the fate of the streets? Do the likes of <i>Cheese</i> take over?" But no, of course not. There are standards to this game! </p>
<p>The variations and gradations that Simon and co. have managed to explore in their typologies of gangsterism over these five seasons -- traditionalists of the Avon/Joe/Charles variety, aspirational game-beyond-the-gamers like Bell, the spooky sociopathy of Marlo -- have been truly remarkable.</p>
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<p><b>Matt Yglesias:</b> Indeed, amidst the nihilism of the cops/politics/newspaper plots, it's actually on the streets that we see some redemptive virtue as the pendulum swings away from Marlo's "kill kill kill" approach and back toward a decent gangster like Slim Charles. It's not exactly the triumph of good over evil, but at least of civilized conduct over unchecked brutality.</p>
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<p><b>Ezra Klein:</b> Moreover, didn't it seem like Marlo, in the end, had fulfilled Prop Joe and Stringer's dream? After all, Joe controlled the co-op by controlling access to the supplier. Marlo, by selling that access for a price so high that the dealers had to band together to buy it, created a coalition of equals. To get with the Greek, they actually had to become a cooperative organization. The co-op is no longer just a grievance board -- it's actually a business partnership.</p>
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<p><b>Sam Rosenfeld:</b> On an aesthetic note -- great to see them revive the Blind Boys of Alabama's terrific cover of "Down in the Hole" (the theme from season one) for the closing montage. It remains my favorite of the five versions, though Steve Earle's slightly electroed entry this season was also great. In fact, let's rank 'em! I've never been able to muster others' enthusiasm for the Tom Waits original, so I'd rank the season theme songs from best to worst thusly: 1,5,3,2,4. Anyone else?</p>
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<p><b>Spencer Ackerman:</b> I think I'm your opposite, Sam. I love Tom Waits' version on season two the best, followed by whoever sings four. (God, that coda! "Keep/ in the hole/ down/ in the hole...") Steve Earle next with season five -- I guess the electro'd elements were supposed to conjure up a 1980s version of a newsroom teletype -- which I would have ranked higher had he made it the sort of raucous, barely-held-together guitar anthem that appears on his work with his old backing band the Dukes. Blind Boys of Alabama from season one next, with the Neville Brothers "meh" version from season three bringing up the rear like a fiending Arabber.</p>
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<p><b>Ann Friedman:</b> One more thing about the newsroom plot: I found it incredibly frustrating that Simon and the other writers chose not to write a scene where Gus shows the contents of his file on Templeton to the higher-ups. I don't necessarily need a happy ending -- with Gus vindicated and Alma promoted and Templeton fired -- but I would really have liked to have seen that confrontation. I waited all season for it, in fact. I know that putting everything out there and holding the audience's hand isn't <i>The Wire</i>'s style, and in some cases, like the fact that they never reveal the misdeeds in Daniels' past, I don't mind. Maybe it's being a journalist, but I just wanted to see with my own eyes the managing editor and the publisher shoot down Gus's evidence of Templeton's fabrications. But maybe I'm being too greedy. After all, the scene where McNulty confronts Templeton at the police department served the same function, to a certain degree. The two fabricators, alone in a room together, bound by their mutual lie. I suppose that scene managed to scratch my itch to see Templeton slapped on the wrist or worse. The look on Templeton's face-- truly priceless. </p>
<p>Those complaints aside, I think this final episode justified the newspaper subplot to a certain degree. After all, without a season's worth of scenes about how the newspaper is falling down on the job, it might be hard to believe that the story of McNulty's major fabrication wouldn't slip out of the oh-so-leaky Baltimore police department and mayor's office. As the season was written, it was completely believable that no reporter would ever sniff out the story. Who's cultivating sources? Where are the beat reporters? If someone in the police department wanted to leak the story, would they even know who to call at the paper?</p>
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<p><b>Kay Steiger:</b> I'm with Sam and agree that season one's version of "Down in the Hole" is more meaningful to me than any of the other seasons (although season four comes close). </p>
<p>Overall, I was pretty pleased with the series finale. It wasn't, as Spencer said, perfect, but I think that Simon and the other writers did what they could with the resources they had. I would have of course preferred to have seen the dénouement played out, but the montage generally gave us an idea of what was going to happen to this expansive cast of characters. As we've discussed before, the writers were only given 10 episodes to finish off one of the most complicated and realistic plots in television history. As has often been echoed, the writers were asked to "do more with less." </p>
<p>On the newspaper subplot, I'm basically with Ann on this one. (I'm sure that Simon, if reading this would cry, but it's <i>fiction</i>! Don't they get that they're crying about a fabricator not getting caught in <i>fiction</i>?) Although I think the newspaper subplot, however disappointing, fits well into the overall theme. </p>
<p>In the end, as Ezra says, it's all in the game, and the game is rigged. Marlo, as much as he would like to become Stringer Bell, lacks the savvy and the know-how with those upper-class schmucks to really accomplish the legitimate business. Marlo, like so many others on the show, is trapped by his past. Just the same, Dukie couldn't really become anything other than a drug addict, with no family and no friends to help him. The most heartbreaking scene in this last episode for me was when Prezbo took a long look at Dukie and decided that he was probably already too far gone to help. It's almost as if he already suspected what he saw when he dropped the teenager off: Dukie was already well on his way to becoming a junkie. Furthermore, the scene where all the dealers come together to broker a deal -- as Ezra said, a true cooperative business partnership, we see that the game plays on. </p>
<p>There's a thread to pull on here. At first, Simon, Burns, and the other writers made us believe that real justice can be done by doing real po-lice work. After all, we couldn't help but feel victorious when the Barksdale case went down, and we were all encouraged enough by the serial killer plot because it might help Lester bring Marlo down. By showing that the game goes on, even with the kingpin out and real police work back up, it goes to show that there really isn't hope. It doesn't matter whether the police waste their time with corner pickings or if they do long, investigative career-making cases. Hell, it doesn't even matter if the newspaper reports the shit out of the corruption surrounding it. In the end, the writers have clearly said, the game still goes on. </p>
<p>I suspect this has something to do with the <a href="http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1719872,00.html">opinion piece</a> that the writers published in <i>Time</i> last week that declared the drug war essentially a huge waste. And I'm inclined to agree with them on this. Certainly all the law enforcement has put too many people in prison. But the solution the <i>Wire</i> writers proposed was a rather simplistic one: Just stop pursuing all drug crime. That's probably an extreme reading of what they said, but not too far off, given they all pledged to acquit anyone they ever encountered as a juror with a drug crime. </p>
<p>As we've all seen thanks to Simon, et al's fantastic narrative, things are more complicated than they look. Certainly cracking down on drug crime is disastrous, but taking a lesson from Hamsterdam, so is letting it fester. The answer lies somewhere in the middle. I think that's the discussion we ought to be having, not whether the last episode of <i>The Wire</i> did justice to the fictional -- or not so fictional -- world that the show's writers created.</p>
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<p><b>Matt Yglesias:</b> Following up on Kay's points, I'm not sure what we're supposed to make about Daniels' self-righteous belief in the power of clean stats and good policing. On the one hand, this is such a major theme of the show that you kind of have to believe that, yes, they <i>are</i> telling us that a well-run police department could fix the city. On the other hand, Daniels' faith in this concept seems badly undercut by the extent to which the game is rigged in a much bigger sense -- the Greek is protected by the FBI, the drug laws are unenforceable, kids coming from shattered, impoverished backgrounds don't have a shot at much of anything, etc. </p>
<p>Daniels is gone in the end, of course, but it's interesting how many characters -- Sidnor, Kima, Carver, Bunk -- are left in play with a real sense that good policing can make a difference. You're left with Herc, McNulty, Daniels, and Freamon (who memorably remarked back in season three that "the job will not save you") as counterpoints but that's still a lot of faith and optimism for a show that's so lacking in faith and optimism. In the political system, by contrast, Simon sees no possibility of redemption. Not even change around the margin. Carcetti's contention that putting a Democrat in Annapolis would do a lot to help Baltimore is massively self-serving, but putting my political pundit hat on it's also almost certainly true (similarly, one might add that 2007 is the first year that a substantial number of politicians representing African-American constituencies wield powerful chairman's gavels in the House of Representatives, but it's unlikely to be the last). </p>
<p>The utter bleakness of Simon's vision about this stuff makes for compelling drama (his analogies to Greek tragedy aren't far off) but the morning after when I step out onto the streets of a city where the murder rate is less than half of what it was ten years ago to go write and think about American politics, I just don't believe it.</p>
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<p><b>Sam Rosenfeld:</b> It's very true that the War on Drugs' effect of eroding sound policing practices and an effective institutional police culture has been a key theme throughout the show; taken on its own terms, it's an important and well-dramatized insight, but the implication that Simon and co. have always seemed to be making that it's <i>the</i> key to inner-city violence or the urban crisis writ large is indeed uncharacteristically dewy-eyed. As for the fact that this show has had the somewhat odd luck of portraying the still-all-too-real problems of American cities during an era when these issues haven't loomed very large politically and when, indeed, national violent crime rates have been far lower than they were 15 and 20 years ago, one thing perhaps worth noting is Baltimore exceptionalism in this regard: I don't have numbers in front of me, but it's my understanding that Baltimore <i>never</i> partook in the great 1990s crime drop to any significant degree, which really does set it apart from most of the rest of the country.</p>
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<p><b>Matt Yglesias:</b> Right. The Baltimore murder drop in the 1990s was much smaller than what you saw in other cities, and in the 21st century it's bounced up and down rather than continuing to fall as in many other cities. This is, obviously, an important fact about Baltimore that Simon uses to his advantage. But it's important for readers in the real world to understand that this reflects some specific policy failures on the part of the relevant officials and not the sort of "the game is rigged" metaphysical problem that Simon portrays. Pragmatic reformist liberalism would make a shitty television show compared to Simon's apocalyptic radical/reactionary vision, but it's much better politics and public policy.</p>
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<p><b>Ezra Klein:</b> Which brings up an interesting point. One of my readers said to me, "You know, it's only you big media types that hate the newsroom stuff. I thought it was decent. It's not the best plotline ever, but it wasn't. that. bad." But it was that bad! Maybe it wasn't unpleasant to watch, but it was fundamentally misleading as to the problems and pressures assailing the modern newspaper. Many of us media types know that because we work in newsrooms, so it was more annoying because it broke with our general trust in <i>The Wire</i>'s intellectual honesty and reportorial accuracy. </p>
<p>Similarly, a lot of the political stuff rang hollow to me because, well, I know a lot about politics. I thought it significantly better than the newsroom angles (in part because patterning a story off a close read of Martin O'Malley's political career is obviously going to work better than patterning a story off of people who pissed you off at your last job), but it fell flat fairly frequently. Politicians are craven, but it really would be better for the social safety net to have a Democrat in the governor's mansion. <i>The Wire</i> implied that that wasn't true, but it never made the case. </p>
<p>Indeed, it was the stuff that I knew precisely the least about that seemed most compelling. Now, it may be that <i>The Wire</i> was simply weaker on the stuff I knew about than the stuff I didn't know about. But, as Matt points out, good policing does appear able to make a difference. And some folks certainly are able to escape poverty. And crime has fallen dramatically since the early-'90s. And police departments clearly have been reformed in various cities. And on, and on. I'd be interested to know how crime experts and urban poverty researchers felt about the show. The newsroom story was savvy and cynical and plausible and informative to folks who didn't know newsrooms, but because lots of reporters watch <i>The Wire</i> and talk about it publicly, it was generally trashed as inaccurate. The other stories could have been savvy and cynical and plausible and informative to folks who didn't know those worlds, but similarly problematic. That wouldn't stop <i>The Wire</i> from having been great television, but so far as folks have taken it as a graduate level seminar on the problems of the modern city, it may be worth thinking through. Some publicity-hungry university press should really commission a book of essays on the subject.</p>
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<p><b>Kay Steiger:</b> I also wanted to bring up one other thing that bothered me: They attributed to McNulty the summary montage of what happens to all characters. I'm sort of wondering why they chose to funnel this through him when they could have left it freestanding. McNulty wasn't the main character in the story. They really pushed this point when he pretty much disappeared last season, so it was really confusing to me to attribute everything to him in the end. My colleague said she wishes she'd seen more of the street. That's after all, the strength of the show.</p>
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<p><b>Sam Rosenfeld:</b> This may be getting a bit off the rails and digressive, but Matt, your general point about Simon's "the game is rigged" radical pessimism concerning the prospects of piecemeal reform is correct, but that actually runs <i>counter</i> to his apparently sincere belief in the specific and special importance of good policing; probably this is because I'm the son of a criminologist, but explaining American crime mainly in terms of policing policies rather than more expansive issues actually does strike me as naive. Like, it's the whole system, man!</p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 10 Mar 2008 19:02:37 +0000147052 at http://prospect.orgSpencer AckermanIraq, Intelligence Failures, and Kelly Clarksonhttp://prospect.org/article/iraq-intelligence-failures-and-kelly-clarkson
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><i>When A.J. Rossmiller came home from Iraq, word spread across the liberal precincts of the blogosphere about a young intelligence officer who saw the illogic of the Iraq war from deep inside, who spent his time in Baghdad chuckling with disgust as he heard Donald Rumsfeld lie to the country about U.S. intelligence collecting. I admit to being a little skeptical at the time. But in e-mails, in posts at <a href="http://www.americablog.com/">AMERICAblog</a>, and over beers, Rossmiller has shared his effortless insight about Iraq with me. Like many who know him, I came away from every encounter thinking, "What an amazing book he’ll write." </i></p>
<p><i>Lots of books have been written about the Iraq misadventure, and more still are on the way. None, I’ll wager, will offer what </i><a href="http://www.bookswelike.net/isbn/0891419144">Still Broken</a><i> does: a masterful writer’s voice; a raw, personal tour of the trauma of waging a distasteful war; an insider's view of the wreckage of the U.S. intelligence community; and Kelly Clarkson worship. </i></p>
<p><i>TAP Online asked me to interview Rossmiller now that </i>Still Broken<i> is out.</i> </p>
<p><b>Spencer Ackerman</b>: I won't pretend I've finished <i><a href="http://www.bookswelike.net/isbn/0891419144">Still Broken</a></i>, your excellent memoir/cri de coeur of your experiences as an intelligence officer in Iraq. But what I've read is excellent, and anyone interested in either Iraq or intelligence work will find it fascinating. One thing, though. I'm interested in both Iraq and intelligence work. And you were in Iraq for a whole year, if I'm not mistaken, without leaking to me a single time. Not once. Not even so much as an e-mail I got from you. What did I do to deserve this insult? </p>
<p>Or to phrase the question differently: A lot of people—reporters, progressives, progressive bloggers who report—would have found your experiences in 2005 in Iraq invaluable. A well-timed leak could have cut through the fog of obfuscation put out by the Bush administration. There you were at the Tactical Operations Center, armed with the material that's now in <i>Still Broken</i>, and a private e-mail address. Why no leaks? </p>
<p>Of course, if you answer, "Well, Spencer, I leaked to other people," we're not friends any more. </p>
<p><b>A.J. Rossmiller</b>: I am, of course, horrified that you haven't read my transcendent tome, but seeing as how you continue to be among the best observers of military and intelligence issues around, I'm willing to let it slide. And your question is an interesting one, one that I haven't been asked before. The answer comes in two parts: First, even if I had wanted to get that kind of information out, I—like, I think, most of the people involved at the analytical level of the intelligence business—wouldn't have had any idea where to go. I became acquainted with the entire set of young D.C. bloggers and journalists after I left the Department of Defense (DoD), not before, and there's no real conception within the machine that anyone is interested in the kind of mundane problems and manipulations that occur when you're in the middle of them. Only when I ruefully described my experiences to others in the world of professional foreign policy did it become clear just how aberrant things were in the intelligence process, which ended up being the motivation for writing the book. </p>
<p>The second part, which is perhaps more determinative, is the fact that even if I had known where to go with information, I didn't have a very good conception of what the rules were regarding talking to reporters (or anybody) about the work, other than, "Don't ever do it." To the best of my knowledge any kind of information transmission had to be cleared From Above, and even if you're simply talking about unclassified information which, of course, everything in my book is, after a lengthy (and costly) DoD review process—it's a scary (and possibly illegal) call to make on your own. The polygraph exams definitely cover whether you’ve revealed confidential information, and it’s a tough thing to ask a young analyst to potentially ruin his career, or worse, by reaching out into the unknown. People at the top know how that stuff works; people at the analytical level do not. </p>
<p><b>SA</b>: In the book, you admirably confess to your bad taste in music. ("My work was fueled by steady doses of Evanescence, Linkin Park, Sarah McLachlan[!], Metallica, the Dixie Chicks, and the like.") First, kudos for surviving the savage beatings you must have endured from your colleagues. But you also disclose that you wrote an e-mail to friends and family that "took the format of matching Kelly Clarkson lyrics to my observations" about Iraq. </p>
<p>Somehow, though, those lyrics didn't make it into the book. Fess up, Rossmiller: What does Kelly Clarkson tell us about Iraq? </p>
<p><b>AR:</b> I'm glad you brought this up, because it allows me to address two very important issues. First and foremost, Kelly Clarkson has plenty to tell us about an infinite number of topics, from the mundane to the critical. Can't say enough about the talent there, and she helped keep me sane in Baghdad. I'm obviously not afraid to acknowledge my affection for pop music in all its glory, which brings me to the second point, about the advance praise on the back cover from Joe Klein, who jokes about my bad taste in the midst of a very kind endorsement of the book, saying, "And while Rossmiller demonstrates, repeatedly, that his taste in music really needs an upgrade, he also proves to be an engaging, skillful, and funny writer." Joe takes a lot of flack on the internets, but for the (surprisingly many) people who have asked about that blurb, it is indeed a reference to the text, obviously, and all in good fun—and it demonstrated he had actually read the whole thing, which was a nice compliment in itself. </p>
<p>To answer your question more specifically, though, I'm very pleased to present here, exclusively to TAP Online, a few brief excerpts of the original, unedited version of that chapter! </p>
<p><i>When you go in circles all the scenery looks the same, And you don't know why . . . </i><br />
That was for my hours, which were pretty crazy. We worked all the time, and in a wartime environment, as you know from your embed time, everything is the same, every day all day, except for when bad things happen. "All the scenery looks the same" indeed. </p>
<p><i>It's like the only company I seek, is misery all around; It's like you're a leech, sucking the life from me, it's like I can't breathe . . .</i><br />
Iraq is a depressing place. This was followed by a paragraph of me complaining to friends and family, which I'll spare y'all here, but it wasn't happy times, basically, again, because everything was the same all the time—nothing to look forward to. Ever. </p>
<p><i>You thought you had us fooled, at your beck and call; But now who's the joke, and look who's laughing now.<br />
'Cause there are these nights when, I sing myself to sleep; And I'm hoping my dreams, bring you close to me, are you listening? </i><br />
Okay, this one I really don't have any defense for. Let's just say that when you're a DoD analyst working on Iraq, a song titled "Hear Me" has particular appeal. But really, let's just move on. </p>
<p><b>SA:</b>So you're two years removed from Iraq, and things are, to my way of thinking, somewhere between grim and apocalyptic. But as a former intel analyst, what are we missing? What are the big trends that mere scribes like myself aren't seeing? What structural dynamic hasn't gotten the attention from the press that it deserves? And to ask an unfair question: What do you think we're likely to see in Iraq after the surge brigades leave this summer? </p>
<p><b>AR:</b> Ah, the meaty questions! Indeed, the Iraq situation continues to be grim, especially because I believe the recent security gains are temporary at best and a distraction from profound strategic problems at worst. The thing that most observers miss is, I think, the possibility that Iraq could get much, much worse for the U.S.—both tactically and strategically—than it is now. Currently between 80 and 90 percent of the Iraqi population is relatively acquiescent toward U.S. forces, with the anti-U.S. violence mostly being perpetrated by Sunnis and a very small number of Shiites. If the Shiites, especially, were to turn on us in any significant way, the present situation would seem tame by comparison, and the Shiites are increasingly dissatisfied with U.S. strategy (as they should be, seeing as how we're funding and arming their opposition in Anbar). The other structural dynamic that is terribly overlooked is the situation in Basra. While most reporters and pundits look at the Sunni west, the real prize is in the south, and the battle for the <i>vast</i> majority of Iraq's oil wealth is happening without any apparent engagement or even attention from the U.S. It's a profoundly negligent approach. </p>
<p>Also, I'd note that while you call yourself a "mere scribe," readers should know that's not right, and there are excellent sources for Iraq analysis in the media, if not most "mainstream" sources. <i>You</i> are missing very little, and you make the <a href="http://www.washingtonindependent.com/">Washington Independent</a> required reading for anybody interested in these issues. To recognize our hosts, <a href="http://www.prospect.org/cs/author?id=1815">Matthew Duss</a>, a regular contributor to <a href="http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped">TAPPED</a>, is another one consistently right on with these issues. I'm by no means alone in providing reality-based views, and I think it's vital to recognize—and read!—the people who get this stuff right on a regular basis. </p>
<p>As for this summer, this isn't a particularly daring answer, but assuming that the Bush administration continues to mistake Band-Aid solutions for strategy, I think we'll see increased fighting in Kirkuk between Kurds and Arabs, increased fighting in Anbar between the current Sunni groups and U.S.-funded former insurgents (a.k.a. Anbar Awakening forces, a.k.a. Sons of Iraq), and nationwide violence levels somewhere in between 2006 and 2007 levels. Ouch. </p>
<p><b>SA:</b> One of my favorite moments in the book is something wonky and intel-specific. You write about the character differences between intelligence collectors (the dudes who go out and get information) and intelligence analysts (the dudes who tell us what it means). But you also write that it's a stereotype to say that these guys view each other as being from an unfamiliar and sometimes hostile world -- the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kree-Skrull_War">Kree and the Skrull</a> from <i>The Fantastic Four</i> and <i>The Avengers</i>, for instance. Really? In my experience the stereotype is true. But you have experience that I don't, so complicate that picture for me. </p>
<p><b>AR:</b> There are definitely significant differences in personality and approach between collectors and analysts—or cowboys and desk-jockeys, if you prefer the common pejoratives—and there is often distrust or at least misunderstanding that results. What I really wanted to get across, though, is that I think the conflict between the two groups is more due to institutional segregation and lack of communication rather than some inherent fact that analysts are nerdier and collectors are risk-takers, roughly speaking. </p>
<p>In Iraq, I got to work <i>directly with</i> collectors, helping to formulate questions, talking about what information we needed, and generally giving a strategic overview to what can sometimes be a very narrowly focused job. Conversely, collectors gave us context for the sources they deal with, personal views about reliability, and a sense of what kind of information could be procured and what could not. It's easy to see how keeping these elements separate can engender misunderstanding or mistrust. I understand the security issues involved, but there must be a way to increase communication and understanding between the people who get the raw information and those who process it. The benefits are tremendous. </p>
<p><b>SA</b>: OK, big picture time. In 2009 President Clinton or President Obama appoints you director of national intelligence. You're given carte blanche to fix the still-broken intelligence community. Congress is begging to pass the Rossmiller Intelligence Reform Act. Nothing's off limits. What do you do? </p>
<p><b>AR</b>: I should start this with the caveat that I never had the bird's-eye view that really gave me a sense of what kind of overall policy changes would fix this stuff. First of all, I'd get every analyst a goddamn computer. It might seem minor, but as I mention in the book, we lost tons of man hours because there were more people than computers in the Iraq office. The Iraq office! After literally years of war! Of course, there were plenty of huge flat-screen TVs on the walls, so we had all the Fox News we wanted. </p>
<p>More broadly, though, I would institute the remaining 9-11 commission recommendations, and I'd standardize the communication systems of the various agencies. I can't really get into the details about this, but it's absurdly difficult for, say, a Defense Intelligence Agency Iraq analyst to communicate with a CIA Iraq analyst—to the extent that I never even knew who my counterparts were at CIA or the State Department. I don't know that a law would be the way to do this, but I'd definitely encourage communication between agencies, including the military, both among analysts and between analysts and collectors. </p>
<p>I would also strongly encourage placement of regional experts in positions of intel leadership -- for example, the primary intelligence adviser to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is a Pacific Command guy, for crying out loud, with no expertise in the Middle East. I'd increase recruiting from Middle East Studies programs, throw money at Arabic (and Farsi and Urdu) speakers, and I'd bump salaries up to try to convince talented grads to be intel analysts instead of investment banking analysts. </p>
<p>Most important, intel should be approached in a much more empirical way. It's predictive analysis, and predictions have a way of turning out either right or wrong. Right now there's just no focus on who got what right or wrong, and why. We should give more responsibility and power to people who get stuff right, and less to those who don't. As it is, we don't even know which analysts are in what category. It's a waste, and it means the same people can get it wrong over and over and over with no repercussions (and, conversely, no additional credence to the accurate folks). </p>
<p>I really believe a lot of this stuff can be fixed, otherwise I wouldn't have written the book, but it's going to take hard work, better leadership, and some time. A guy can hope, right? </p>
<p>And thanks to you, Spencer, for great questions, and to the <i>Prospect</i> for facilitating the banter. Tons of information about the book at <a href="http://www.stillbroken.com/">www.StillBroken.com</a>, and it's available now everywhere books are sold. Cheers! </p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 20 Feb 2008 16:40:26 +0000147005 at http://prospect.orgSpencer AckermanWireTAP: A Dialogue About <em>The Wire</em> (Episodes 4-6)http://prospect.org/article/wiretap-dialogue-about-wire-episodes-4-6
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>The fifth and final season of HBO's groundbreaking drama, <a href="http://www.hbo.com/thewire/"><i>The Wire</i></a>, is upon us. Every three episodes, we'll bring you a discussion of the series between <i>TAP Online</i> writers. This week, Kriston Capps kicks off our dialogue about episodes four, five, and six. In addition to the crew from <a href="http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=wiretap1">our last discussion</a>, we're joined this time around by former TAP Online editor Sam Rosenfeld. <i>--The Editors</i> <br /><b></b></p>
<p>Kriston Capps: Prop Joe is dead, Omar is still alive, and McNulty is still tailing a serial killer -- all improbable outcomes in a season that, if possible, is only getting worse.</p>
<p>At the risk of pointing out the obvious -- David Simon betrayed Prop Joe. Joe was incomparably careful and even nervous when he gave Marlo's poker game to Omar in season four: Joe was worried, and rightly so, that it would fall back on him one day. Knowing full well that he is caught between Omar and Marlo's lines of fire, indeed, knowing full well that he placed himself there, he finds reason to suspect his own blood when Marlo touches Butchie. He <i>knows</i> that the Cheese stands alone. Prop Joe knows well enough to tip off Slim Charles to the fact. And then, in his overcautious wisdom, he keeps Cheese as his security. This complaint comes after the fact of his foolishness in not recognizing Marlo's plot for what it was. He claims to Marlo that he adopted him, like a son, and although there's reason enough to see Prop Joe as simply angling for his life with that line, there's no more reason to believe that it's true than there is to believe that it would work. At the same time there's no <i>alternative</i> explanation for why Prop Joe was so careless. </p>
<p>With the reemergence of Omar, we have a battle of superheroic proportions. I'm as big a fanboy as the next guy, so I'm excited to see a Wolverine-vs-Punisher type of throw-down in the works. However, even if I'm willing to suspend disbelief and accept that Omar could survive that several-story fall (and I'm not), I cannot appreciate that David Simon would be so tawdry as to use <i>suspense</i> as a storytelling strategy. Episode five ends with the viewer wondering whether and how Omar survived the jump. As a viewer, I'm annoyed to be left with a cliffhanger -- of all things -- in such an epic reimagining of television drama as <i>The Wire</i> has proved to be. The very interesting thing about the battle between Omar and Chris is the relationship between Chris and Marlo (as is developed in episode six). Chris made his move and missed, and he believes that his mistake might be fatal because Marlo won't accept it. This will prove to be one of the first exceptional internal tests of the Stanfield crew. Which is so much more interesting, and such a better question to leave a viewer with at the end of an episode, than the question of whether, say, Omar is an Olympic-level acrobat. </p>
<p>There was a previous sequence in <i>The Wire</i> that also proved to be pretty fantastical -- at least as fantastical as the absurd and patience-testing development that two serial liars might be bilaterally collaborating on a fabrications of municipal proportions: Hamsterdam. The difference between Hamsterdam and McNulty's ripper is that the former was established after several seasons developing the structural problems that make change impossible. Hamsterdam was an experiment, an exception to prove the rule. Add to that the fact that it was an outstanding allegory for (what was then the in-vogue justification for our ongoing presence in) Iraq and you have a very justifiable departure from reality.</p>
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<p><b>Spencer Ackerman:</b> Kriston, I'm really not sure I understand your point about David Simon betraying Prop Joe. There was nothing implausible about Joe's murder. Joe was not careless at all. He was boxed in. We learned in the final arc of season four that there is only so far Joe is willing to go to give up "my sister's boy." He tells Slim in episode five that he wants to diminish Cheese's role in the East Side operation while he leaves town. What else could Joe do? Pushing Cheese aside is both an admission of weakness to the co-op and a nod to Marlo that Joe recognizes Marlo's game -- right as Joe himself is trying to co-opt Marlo. From every angle, Marlo outplayed Joe, exploited Joe's desire to control him, and boxed him into the mistakes that made his death inevitable. </p>
<p>Thematically, Joe's murder is true to the show. With the co-op, Joe, like Stringer, attempted to reform the drug trade that Simon tells us over and over and over will not accept reform. His death has been pre-ordained at least since that dark day when Stringer fell. Now the question is whether Marlo will be the victim of his own overstretch. It seems fair to say that men who seek to dominate the entire drug trade do not live long. </p>
<p>They also -- in the comic books we love and treasure -- fall victim to the Dark Knight. The most tin-eared line of the show followed its best: Marlo first observing (on behalf of the audience) that Omar's survival "doesn't make sense," and then adding, "that's some Spider-Man shit." No, it's Batman shit. I am very happy the show didn't try to explain Omar's survival, beyond the wrenching scene when he splints his own shattered leg. Do you think he's crying from the pain, or from the shame of not avenging Butchie in one swift, terrible stroke? </p>
<p>Last thing on Omar. We can accept some magical realism here. Omar is less a character than a force of nature. His survival makes no sense if we understand the show literally: Omar goes against Barksdale's empire, then Marlo's empire, and whomever else he's put his gun on in the past -- and he's still alive? No, he's Batman, and he always has been. Simple and plain. It's hard to criticize the Batman scene without misunderstanding the whole character. </p>
<p>But notice what happened when Omar stumbled out of the maintenance closet. He left behind his cape -- that is, his amazing, trademark trench coat. I think that's a hint that his immortality is coming to an end.</p>
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<p><b>Kay Steiger:</b> What struck me after watching episode six was that the season seems to be getting steered a bit back on track: The hierarchy of the drug dealers is taking more of a prominent role, Bunk is digging up the evidence on 22 murders, and Omar is back. But the brief experiment into the fantastical, as Kriston calls it, reeks of series writing like you might find on a soap opera or sitcom -- or, god forbid, <i>24</i> -- rather than <i>The Wire</i>. It seems that the writing has gotten away from the writers. Now they have to rein in the story. </p>
<p>Previews suggest that McNulty wants out of the pseudo serial killer plot, and by god, I do, too. The storyline is so ridiculous that it has restrained the rest of the season. Instead, Bunk is digging up the murders again. If they'd have used the newspaper to leak a story about department incompetence on real murders instead of trying to invent a serial killer, they would have saved everyone time and frustration. </p>
<p>The newspaper storyline is still heavy-handed. When Templeton comes through with an actual story from a homeless vet (yes, they <a href="http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/anderson.cooper.360/blog/2006/11/cooper-on homeless-iraq-veterans.html">do exist</a>), Gus compliments him by saying, "it's not overwritten." Awesome. Way to hit us over the head with a sledge hammer.</p>
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<p><b>Kriston Capps:</b> Spencer, Prop Joe was leaving the city when he was murdered -- it's not exactly the time for keeping up appearances, and though I agree that that's one reason why Prop Joe would keep Cheese close rather than try to discover the truth or shut him out fully, it's not good reason for taking any chances. I recognize that none of this would have happened had Prop Joe been more cautious and so complaining that Prop Joe wasn't cautious risks missing the point. But, as you say, Prop Joe was trapped -- that's when you expect him to reach out and grasp at straws. Did he or didn't he know that his fall was imminent? In season four it seemed that he knew there was little he could do to escape that trap. But by season five it seems that he forgot he was in it. </p>
<p>Regarding Omar as Batman, I think that you might inadvertently affirm my point here. Batman is not awesome by dint of his amazing flying powers (okay, he is an awesome gymnast, martial artist, scientist -- all around pretty great guy). He's great because he's simply better prepared than his enemies. He doesn't trust to luck that he'll jump out a window and survive; he jumps out a window because that's his contingency plan.</p>
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<p><b>Sam Rosenfeld:</b> I, too, took Omar's flying leap as the clearest tweak yet by Simon at commentators who <i>continue</i> at this date to blockheadedly praise the show's unvarnished documentary-like ultra-realism, despite the obviously mythic qualities of some of the show's major characters, Omar most of all. And while Kriston's right to point out that the show doesn't typically end episodes on a cliffhanger ... well, what's wrong with a cliffhanger? I'm not above a little suspense. </p>
<p>As for Prop Joe's demise, I again join Spencer in pushing back against the hate parade a bit -- I thought Joe's conversation with Slim Charles, in which he acknowledged both that he had suspicions of Cheese and that he could only go so far in turning against family, was all the foreshadowing that was necessary. In general, I had found episode four terrific and distinctly less uneven than others this season -- from the funny-scary pre-credits scene showing the corner boys' prank on the cops and Colicchio's explosion, through the affecting Carver-Herc dialogue over beers, all the way to Marlo's freaky stare in the final frame of the show. The next two episodes saw a return to some serious problems, alas, about which more soon.</p>
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<p><b>Matt Yglesias:</b> On Omar, I'm mostly with Sam and Spencer. He's always been a mythic element in the show, and key to Simon's use of allegory, genre play, etc. The explicit referencing of Spider-Man fits the pattern, much like his spaghetti western standoff in an earlier season. My only problem here is that "Omar hell bent on revenge it's not about the money this time" is quite literally a plot arc we've seen before. It's not a bad plot arc, but it's a bit tired, reminiscent of the way <i>The Sopranos</i> started to recycle themes the longer the show went on. </p>
<p>But beyond the obvious complaints about the newspaper storyline, I'm perturbed by Simon's deployment of what amount to cameos of characters from past seasons who seem to have no real role in season five. The Randy scene was brilliant and affecting, but the Nick Sobotka appearance was heavy-handed ("symbolically speaking, Mr. Mayor, our indifference to that man stands in for the political system's indifference to the plight of the working class") and also wrenching in terms of plot mechanics. Isn't Nick supposed to be in federal witness protection? If he left and he's back on the streets of Baltimore, shouldn't he be dead? One could imagine stories here, but as Simon doesn't want to tell them he should let the character lie. The relationship to the season two plotline was clear enough. </p>
<p>Similarly, Avon. The scene with him talking to Marlo was really fun to watch, but in retrospect it's left me cold. That wasn't, in retrospect, an important plot point Simon was developing. It was just a bit of candy for the audience -- look, it's Avon! Neat, but who cares? One of the signature elements of <i>The Wire</i> used to be an extraordinary economy of narrative force. Nothing happened *just because* it made for a neat scene of television -- everything was advancing plot arcs or thematic points. Now, given only ten episodes to wrap the show up, Simon is suddenly giving us throwaway moments. It seems unworthy of the show.</p>
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<p><b>Spencer Ackerman:</b> Last thing I'll say about Omar. Matt, don't you think Simon is bookending Omar here? You're right to say we've literally seen an Omar: Out for Vengeance plot before. But the theme was introduced in season one, when Omar's vendetta against the Barksdales began after they murdered Brandon. The fallout from Brandon's death accounts for probably 60 percent of the Omar scenes <i>The Wire</i> has given us. It seems appropriate to reprise the theme for the series finale. </p>
<p>Also, more has to be said about the Randy cameo. It was among the most haunting scenes <i>The Wire</i> has ever -- <i>ever</i> -- offered. Randy begins season four as the can-do hustler, set to get over. He slings candy, not drugs. He takes to Prez's math class when he learns how he can hustle at dice. And he promises us he's going to own his own store one day. Then all hell breaks loose: Marlo puts on the street that Randy's a snitch, simply to test whether Michael stands tall for his friend. It leads to the destruction of Randy's life. </p>
<p>Last night we saw the wages of what failed systems yield. Randy, back in foster care, where he was brutally beaten in the closing montage of season four, is now himself a monster. He lives by prison rules: when he storms out of his brief meeting with Bunk, he screams that he'll kill the detective if he's given the opportunity. That makes sense given his reputation as a snitch. But then, as he's marching up the stairs, he finds a little kid in his way and shoves the kid down. </p>
<p>If anyone whines that <i>The Wire</i> isn't real after watching that scene, s/he forfeits his/her membership to the critics' club. Randy is the streets. The thug you see on your evening news -- brutal, pathological, seemingly senseless -- probably started out as Randy, and then the systems failed him. I wanted, like Carver in season four, to scream for no one to hear and impotently beat my steering wheel at what's happened to Randy. Before he's 21, he'll be dead or in jail. And no one will ever care.</p>
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<p><b>Kriston Capps:</b> Randy's appearance is too little, too late, to rescue this season from some its more painful moments. The scene that comes to mind is the one in which Dukie and Cutty are talking about Michael, and Dukie says (in dialogue, out loud) that Michael grew up too fast. That's the sort of connective tissue that this show has labored to avoid -- parataxis is as critical as dialect to the success of dialogue in the show. I appreciate the scene with Randy but I have to say, I don't believe that this scene told us anything we couldn't infer from the denouement of season four. I'm affected to see him resort to monster tactics, but I'm not surprised or horrified to the same degree I was when he's beaten as soon as he enters the group home. In part, that scene was so horrifying because the viewer realizes that Randy has finally, and for good, fallen out of one system and into another one. It looks as though you'll be revoking my membership, but I'm going to call that scene just fine but a little bit redundant, and not on par with what we saw in season four. </p>
<p>I do think we're treated to a few moments of extraordinary dialogue in the newsroom -- the bit that Kay highlighted, when Haynes praises Templeton's authentic text, and when the editors call for a "Dickensian" series on homelessness. These mimetic tweaks by the authors at the show's audience -- not at its critics, even, but at its <i>most enthusiastic supporters</i> -- are brilliant. I haven't read all the interviews with David Simon, et al., so I don't know why he rejects this high praise or whether he's just having fun with it. I know I have myself used that exact term, so I feel like I've been <i>pwned</i>.</p>
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<p><b>Sam Rosenfeld:</b> In general I continue to endorse Spencer's valiant efforts at beating back the negative tide. But now, onto some problems: Nobody appears to dispute that the dual fabulist plotlines strain basic credulity in a way that really does distinguish them from past story arcs and past seasons. I frankly welcomed episode five's scene in the newsroom when McNulty's and Templeton's lies finally merge, both because the extended look on McNulty's face when he realizes what the reporter is up to really is laugh-out-loud priceless, and because I figured if the writers are committed to pursuing these plotlines, they might as well go all the way and make the plot turns and role inversions truly baroque, farcical, and darkly funny. (At the same time I certainly hope Kay's right that the show's attention might be shifting elsewhere.) </p>
<p>But the biggest flaw of this story arc, even taking it on its own implausible turns, is the <i>blankness</i> of Templeton's character -- and it's not blankness in the rich, haunting, what's-going-on-behind-those-cat-eyes sociopathic manner of Marlo, it's blankness as a dramatic byproduct of the writers just not being interested in this character as a person. How, for example, is Templeton interpreting and dealing with the fact that a cop is now validating and elaborating upon his own lie, for seemingly obscure reasons? The writers don't bother to show us over the course of an entire subsequent episode, simply sending him off to interview a Iraq vet instead (though the vet's "look ma, no hands," line, directed at Templeton, was admittedly clever). The question doesn't even seem to have occurred to them. </p>
<p>Another point of seeming consensus here is the writers' shocking use of Lester Freamon, leveraging the sense of trust and gravitas that the audience has come to attribute to the character over the years in the service of rendering McNulty's scheme more plausible or palatable. On this issue, commenter James Angove has turned out to be quite prescient in a point he made in the <a href="http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article=wiretap1#comments">thread</a> to WireTAP's first installment: </p>
<blockquote><p>I think its interesting that so many people see Lester as the moral center of the police on the wire. I don't think there is any reason to believe that; he's less obviously self-destructive than McNulty, but not profoundly different. He's a crusader, he's deeply impressed with his own righteousness, and he's obviously and historically perfectly comfortable immolating himself to make a largely futile point.</p>
<p>Bunk, to my mind, is clearly the moral center of the Wire's police universe. He a good police, and a good detective, but he never makes the mistake of thinking its about him.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As we see in episode six and in the preview to the episode to come, McNulty may not actually turn out to be the one who ultimately falls fully into the vortex of personal obsession.</p>
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</p>
<p><b>Matt Yglesias:</b> Okay, but WHY the shift in Freamon's attitude? It is a shift. Recall that in season three he's telling McNulty to get a life, warning that 'the job won't save you.'</p>
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<p><b>Ezra Klein:</b> I'm with Spencer on the scene with Randy, but with Matt on the general incoherence of their presentation of past characters. You could imagine a <i>Wire</i> reunion in which all the characters reappear, and do so to make a point. But that's not what's going on. Randy's reemergence was chilling (and may or may not be a one-off), but Avon's was merely comical, and Nick's was beyond heavy-handed -- it was deeply implausible. </p>
<p>And poor Omar. His character always had a slightly opaque role in the show. Was he an avenging angel? A charismatic parasite? An anachronistic samurai battling a world that no longer honors a moral code? Or was he always that which David Simon cannot allow to exist: Hope? Hope that an individual could do extraordinary things, and though his chosen realm of achievement was perverse, remain on the side of the light even while he walked through the streets after dark? Omar, somehow, always floated above the street, like an exiled being from a better place. </p>
<p>But Simon, quite literally, has pulled him back down to earth, and shattered his leg in the process. Now Omar is back on the streets, without his gun, without his trenchcoat, and bereft of his protector and guide (Butchie was to Omar as Splinter was to the Ninja Turtles, as Alfred was to Batman). He's sticking dealers up with beer bottles and taunting Omar with misogyny and homophobia. I predict that Omar will, before this is over, be brought low. Very low. </p>
<p>As for McNulty, the writers seem to be putting him on a collision course with Bunk. Where Bunk's old-fashioned police work looks like it may bust open the case, I'm increasingly sure that something done by McNulty and Freamon will destroy Bunk's investigation. Maybe Bunk will have to cover for his boy, and that act of friendship will cause him to miss a clue, or deny the possession of evidence. Maybe evidence discovered by Bunk will, simultaneously, be illegally obtained by McNulty, and thus rendered inadmissible by the courts. Either way, I'll be surprised if their friendship survives the season.</p>
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<p><b>Kay Steiger:</b> On another note, I've been really glad to see Beadie looking as if she might finally dump McNulty's ass. I feared the writers just tired of the story which made McNulty into a model dad, but now it seems they're going back to actually show the impact on Beadie. The scene with McNulty and his ex-wife was everything I dreaded in the first three episodes. Here, we see the relationships addressed. McNulty really is a shitty dad to his kids, wandering in drunk and late, missing all their important events (something that women just aren't allowed to do); when his ex-wife talks to him about Beadie, she revels a moment where she's over the bitterness of their failed marriage and really just wants to see McNulty happy with his new family, even though it turns out he's a shitty dad to Beadie's kids as well. </p>
<p>Meanwhile the personal relationships of the newspaper characters are pretty much nonexistent; we only see Gus or Alma wake from their partners' beds to conduct newspaper business. This is perhaps partially what makes them so flat and uninteresting to us. As Sam said, the writers aren't interested in them as people.</p>
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</p>
<p><b>Ann Friedman:</b> Episodes four, five and six were markedly better than the first three of the season, in my opinion. I've loved the development that McNulty's shenanigans may actually have the effect of putting Marlo away -- not because his and Lester's crazy scheme works and Marlo falls because of the wiretap, but because McNulty's unconventional methods have inspired Bunk to do "real po-lice work." It's really satisfying to see Bunk make a little headway on the case. It almost makes up for the frustration of watching McNulty treating homeless men like props as he constructs his fake serial killer case. And the frustration I feel at not being able to figure out Lester's character and motivations anymore. </p>
<p>While I share all of the misgivings about the newspaper plot, it's also going to be highly satisfying to watch Gus catch Templeton in his fabrications. That's where things were headed at the end of episode six, when Templeton lied about following up on the seafood poisoning story. It seemed to be a little test that Gus devised, and Templeton clearly failed. I can't wait to see the fallout. </p>
<p>I agreed with Spencer that the scene with Randy was deeply affecting. That's the <i>right</i> way to bring back a character and nod to a previous season. It didn't feel cheap or gimmicky like the Nick Sobotka cameo. </p>
<p>But is anyone else feeling despondent about the writers' ability to wrap this up neatly with only four episodes left?</p>
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</p>
<p><b>Sam Rosenfeld:</b> One possible (albeit weak) stab at an explanation for Freamon's shift in attitude and seeming descent into McNultyesque self-righteous self-destruction: He genuinely believed, as he said in episode three, that he only needed a short amount of time to make the case against Marlo, and thus the serial killer ruse was only needed for a brief infusion of resources. Pride, combined with a lack of understanding of the extent to which Marlo had been toying with the police detail when the investigation was still going, led Freamon to underestimate his foe. Particularly now that Marlo's playing on a whole new level with the Greeks' support (and their encrypted cell phone), both McNulty and Freamon are being pulled into a commitment to their own scheme that they hadn't bargained for in the first place. That's the best I can do -- perhaps James Angove has a better explanation. Or, perhaps it's futile to try. </p>
<p>As for Ann's question about how the writers are possibly going to wrap everything up with the clock winding down, I'm terrible at plot predictions in any setting so won't embarrass myself trying. I'm only hoping for one more gratuitous past-character cameo: A reappearance of Brother Mouzone, this time reading <i>The American Prospect</i> like any self-respecting learned man would.</p>
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<p><b>Kriston Capps:</b> Had Mouzone opted for <i>The American Prospect</i> instead of <i>TheAtlantic Monthly</i> and <i>The New Republic</i>, perhaps his cunning would have pierced Stringer Bell's fog of war. </p>
<p>The scene in which Freamon endorses McNulty's absurd plan was badly written. It's hard not to write it off as mistaken. Not even a self-reflective pause in which Freamon's expression might give us some indication as to whether he was motivated by hubris or resignation or despair -- and our understanding of Freamon's character greatly depends on our ability to assess this new motivation of his.</p>
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</p>
<p><b>Ezra Klein:</b> Oddly enough, I haven't found any of this particularly inexplicable within the context of Freamon's character. Freamon and McNulty were, from the beginning, the most talented cops in the department. They weren't just "good police," they were brilliant police, the type who could crack impenetrable cases and bring down invulnerable villains. And they're being driven mad by the system's indifference. This, I think, is what we're seeing with Freamon, and what's long been telegraphed with McNulty. At first, the dysfunctional bureaucracy punished Freamon and McNulty, leaving them loathed by supervisors and derided by friends. When they refused to back down before that, it marginalized them, pushing them from beloved departments where they could make a real difference to backwater assignments that wasted their abilities. And since they both overcame that, now it will destroy them -- it will drive them mad, and let them wreck their own careers. At the end of the day, you can't reform the game. You can't civilize the streets, and you can't rebuild the agencies. Those who try, fail. Those who try harder are destroyed.</p>
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</p>
<p><b>Spencer Ackerman:</b> I go back and forth on this. As I wrote last go-round, the scene itself didn't feel like an authentic scene, it felt like a DVD extra. But on the question of Freamon's motivation, it's complicated. </p>
<p>Ezra's right about Freamon's frustration with the system, of course. But it's harder to understand how this latest indignity would have been the straw that broke the camel's back. Freamon, after all, was exiled from police work for 14 years. Then he was brought to Major Crimes. Then Major Crimes was disbanded and he went to the Evidence dump. Then he got brought back to Major Crimes. Then Major Crimes was disbanded again, and he got sent to Homicide. Then back to Major Crimes. And then Major Crimes was... disbanded again. </p>
<p>Now, of course, people have their breaking points. Being told you're the <i>de facto</i> leader of the unit of your dreams, licensed to do real police work, on the trail of both a corrupt official and a mass-murdering drug lord, only to have that taken away -- yeah, that can get to you. It might make you, say, yell in the face of the only good Deputy Ops you've ever known, and then fake a serial killer in order to get the resources necessary to bring down said mass-murdering drug lord. Even the legendary patience of Lester Freamon has its limits. </p>
<p>But as I say, I go back and forth.</p>
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</p>
<p><b>Matt Yglesias:</b> Part of what's confusing about Freamon, though, is his relative lack of interest in the Clay Davis charges. In earlier seasons, he's consistently been the one pushing for this investigation for years. Recall that it was precisely worries that pushing too hard on the Barksdales would lead to Davis and the rest of the West Baltimore machine is precisely what got the detail into trouble the first time around. Now Freamon has a political infrastructure in place that wants nothing more than high-profile busts of corrupt politicians and <i>this</i> is the moment he chooses to step way outside the lines in order to chase Marlo? One difference between Freamon and McNulty has always been over their attitude toward precisely this dualism -- McNulty revels in the game of cat-and-mouse with the drug dealers, whereas Freamon has tended to disrespect them and want to go deeper, broader, further. </p>
<p>In a loosely connected way, how is it that throughout seasons three, four, and five none of the cops seem to so much as remember the Greek's existence?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p><b>Spencer Ackerman:</b> Is Matt's point about Freamon's disinterest in Davis really true? The frustration, I thought, stems from the fact that Davis' likely flipping (as Freamon sees it) will lead to new connections -- some implicating Marlo Stanfield. Freamon has always been holistic in his approach, concerned with the big picture, where all the threads lead. Remember his (overly expository) scene with Sydnor at the beginning of episode two, where he marvels at the bulletin-board map of the Davis case and says "All the pieces matter." </p>
<p>Well, Marlo's a piece. He matters. Freamon, of course, was the one who solved the mystery of Marlo's missing bodies. And he's being told he can't go after Marlo. It's a final indignity, when Freamon is this close to closing a case that he's pursued, in one way or another, across the whole season. That doesn't equate to disinterest in Clay Davis.</p>
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</p>
<p><b>Ezra Klein:</b> Right, I think the key is Freamon's feeling of being so near to Marlo. That was his original rationale for McNulty, remember -- he only needed a few days, a few weeks at the most. Back when he was shunted to the Baltimore Police Department's version of Siberia, he didn't feel so close to making a difference, and so could content himself with exile, and making artisan furniture for dollhouses. It's the nearness to success which has driven him around the bend, not because that's harder psychologically, but because it makes the calculus around certain ethical and professional compromises -- inventing a serial killer, say -- seem less clear. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, what's going on with the Bubbles storyline? It's perfectly pleasant, but would anyone miss it were it totally gone? Which brings me to the broader problem I've been trying to articulate with this season. Last night, I was watching <i>Wonder Boys</i>, a film about an aging writer trying to finish the follow-up to the book that made his career. We find, eventually, that the sequel has ballooned beyond 2,400 pages, all of them single-spaced. There are genealogies and dental records and absolutely everything else. Eventually, his student, Katie Holmes, gets her hands on it and reads it. It's beautiful, she says, but you know how you're always telling us that being a writer means making choices? Well, it feels like you didn't make any choices, like you didn't leave anything out, at all. And that's my sense of Simon this season. He's not left anything out, at all.</p>
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</p>
<p><b>Kriston Capps:</b> But instead of pursuing Clay Davis with the aggression we'd expect, he's secluded himself in his bunker, taking time from that case to pursue an <i>illegal</i> wiretap on the advice of wolf-faced crazy McNulty. Whether and how Clay Davis flips hinge on the case that Freamon has built against him. It might make sense for Freamon, acting on a supreme sense resignation, to endorse a suicide option like McNulty's. But the Davis case hasn't played out yet, and Freamon doesn't know that Bond doesn't intend to prosecute Davis on loan falsification.</p>
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</p>
<p><b>Spencer Ackerman:</b> What else can Freamon do on Davis? He gave the case to Pearlman and Bond. He testified at the grand jury. And when it comes to trial, in probably a year, he'll testify then. As an investigator, what else is there?</p>
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<p><b>Kriston Capps:</b> For starters I'd expect him not to do something that might jeopardize or distract from the good work he's put in. And while I wouldn't expect it of any investigator, I'd expect Freamon to want to follow this prosecution, through, to the extent that he's able.</p>
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<p><b>Matt Yglesias:</b> If he has time to kill, maybe he and Sydnor could be doing paperwork investigating into Marlo's assets, see if any of the money links up with the figures involved in the Davis investigation. Try to convince State's Attorney Bond that he ought to go bigger with the whole issue of drug dealers giving money to West Baltimore politicians. </p>
<p>Alternatively, if there's genuinely nothing else to be done on the Clay Davis investigation, why is BPD continuing to pay two detectives to work on the case in the midst of their ongoing fiscal crunch?</p>
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</p>
<p><b>Kay Steiger:</b> What would be sweet if there were a Stanfield/Davis connection through financial assets. That'd be some real po-lice work.</p>
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</p>
<p><b>Spencer Ackerman:</b> They're setting us up for that, don't you think, with the revelation in episode three that Joe laundered his money through the Ministers, who were Davis's base of support?</p>
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</p>
<p><b>Ann Friedman:</b> Agreed, I think the Clay Davis plotline is far from dead, even though they've been devoting relatively little time to it.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p><b>Ezra Klein:</b> I'd add in the news story from the first episode, where we find that the city council president -- whom we now know to be mixed into Davis's dealings -- was doing real estate swaps with drug dealers. They rather let that slip for the moment, but it seemed then, and seems now, like it will be the thread that connects the various institutions -- the dealers will be protected because the politicians move to defend themselves and they call off the police department, and the weakened newspaper doesn't have the right reporters to unearth the links, etc. It's the ultimate Simon finish: Not only is it all in the game, but it's all the same game.</p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 15 Feb 2008 01:02:28 +0000146997 at http://prospect.orgSpencer AckermanThe Counter-Narrative Candidatehttp://prospect.org/article/counter-narrative-candidate
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><a href="http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles/election_08"><img vspace="5" hspace="10" align="left" src="/galleries/img_articles/Elec08_MedButton.JPG" alt="" /></a></p>
<p>There is a lot of speculation that Virginia Senator Jim Webb would make an appealing vice-presidential nominee for the Democrats. Some of it emanates from this magazine. It's not hard to see why. Webb is a tough-as-nails Marine veteran of Vietnam who served as a Navy secretary under Ronald Reagan, a vociferous enemy of the Iraq War, and an extremely improbable progressive. He's also from the capitol of the Old Confederacy as its 13 electoral votes trend Democratic. What's more, if the nominee is Barack Obama, having a war veteran who also writes <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Born-Fighting-Scots-Irish-Shaped-America/dp/0767916891/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1202061768&amp;sr=8-1">paeans to the Scots-Irish cultural tradition</a> round out the ticket creates a juggernaut not seen since <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Avengers_(comics)">Spider-Man joined the New Avengers.</a> </p>
<p>But there's actually a more important way Jim Webb can help elect the Democratic nominee. It has everything to do with the story he can tell at the convention this summer—a story about how the Republican Party abandoned him, and through him, the U.S. military, at a time of war. Call it the Reverse Jeane Kirkpatrick. </p>
<p>On Aug. 20, 1984, Kirkpatrick, the arch anti-communist who served as Ronald Reagan's ambassador to the United Nations, took the microphone at the GOP convention in Dallas and inaugurated a tradition. Kirkpatrick was, she told her audience, a "lifelong Democrat." The trouble, she had come to realize, was that she was also an American. So in an <a href="http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1996/conventions/san.diego/facts/GOP.speeches.past/84.kirkpatrick.shtml">electrifying speech</a> that was at turns vitriolic and sentimental, she implied very strongly that you couldn't really be both. </p>
<blockquote><p>When the San Francisco Democrats treat foreign affairs as an afterthought, as they did, they behaved less like a dove or a hawk than like an ostrich -- convinced it would shut out the world by hiding its head in the sand. … They said that saving Grenada from terror and totalitarianism was the wrong thing to do -- they didn't blame Cuba or the communists for threatening American students and murdering Grenadians -- they blamed the United States instead. But then, somehow, they always blame America first.</p></blockquote>
<p>And on and on in that vein. In one brief speech, Kirkpatrick introduced the world to the phrases "Blame America First" and "San Francisco Democrat"—well understood to mean "Faggot." Subtly, "San Francisco Democrat" had another purpose: it differentiated the alleged radicals in San Francisco from the salt-of-the-earth, America-loving Democrats that could now safely vote for Ronald Reagan. </p>
<p>It was demagogic, incendiary, and ugly. And it was also a masterstroke. The conversion narrative has been a staple in the rise of the New Right since it was new: After all, Reagan himself famously said he never left the Democratic Party, the party left him. But by connecting that sentiment to national security, Kirkpatrick gave her grievance myth a sense of world-historical importance, all before the television cameras. It was a template repeated, among other places, at the 2004 GOP convention by a rabid Zell Miller. Expect Kirkpatrick's bile to be recycled by Joe Lieberman this summer in Minneapolis. </p>
<p>Jim Webb can top it all. He can start out with his family's extremely long history of military service, stretching back countless generations through to Webb's son, a Marine veteran of Fallujah. The Webbs serve when called—but the contract of service is for the country never to call upon men to give their lives in a futile, unnecessary cause. After Vietnam, Webb can say, he became a Republican because the GOP seemed to understand that—and because they also understood that there are certain things that are worth fighting for when viewed through clear, dispassionate eyes. </p>
<p>But somewhere along the line the GOP lost its way. His campaign for Senate in 2006 was predicated on the idea, at least implicitly. As much as he <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2004-02-18-veterans-edit_x.htm">continued to resent</a> John Kerry's outspoken anti-war advocacy in the 1970s, he could nevertheless understand that, this time around, the greater enemy wasn't overzealous opposition to a disastrous war, but the <i>disastrous war itself</i>. And the source of that disaster is in a militarism gone out of control, unmoored from any intelligence conception of the national interest, cheapened by its condescending view of soldiers as mere tools of foreign policy or else as political wedge issues, and indicative of a broader corruption at the heart of an exhausted GOP. </p>
<p>To say that a speech like the one Webb is positioned to deliver would have an impact is to understate matters tremendously. The <a href="http://www.militarycity.com/polls/2007activepoll_iraq.php">latest <i>Military Times</i> poll</a>, unscientific as it is, finds tremendous ambivalence with Bush: As many military personnel disapprove of him as approve, and 35 percent of the most pro-war cohort in the U.S. believe the country should never have invaded Iraq. Since the Iraq War began, <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-brooks5jan05,0,3406790.column">uniformed identification with the GOP has declined</a>. More anecdotally, signs of military frustration with the GOP show through in unlikely places. In a recent debate on the surge for the influential military blog Small Wars Journal, an Army lieutenant colonel named Gian Gentile <a href=" http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/showthread.php?t=4782&amp;highlight=Mansoor">called the idea</a> that he didn't act in line with best counterinsurgency practices in 2006 in Iraq a "myth created by the neocon spin machine." Perhaps even more tellingly, Gentile's rhetorical sparring partner, a key aide to Gen. David Petraeus named Col. Pete Mansoor, took umbrage at the association. </p>
<p>None of this is to say that Webb wouldn't be a solid addition to the Democratic ticket. But even if he's not the VP, at the convention, he still has a lot to offer: a counter-narrative that exposes the GOP for damaging national security through its demagogic addiction to pointless militarism. </p>
<p><i>Editor's Note: This piece has been corrected. Virginia has 13 electoral votes, not 11 as the piece originally stated.</i> </p>
</div></div></div>Tue, 05 Feb 2008 16:41:26 +0000146982 at http://prospect.orgSpencer AckermanWireTAP: A Dialogue about The Wire (Episodes 1-3)http://prospect.org/article/wiretap-dialogue-about-wire-episodes-1-3
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>The fifth and final season of HBO's groundbreaking drama, <a href="http://www.hbo.com/thewire/"><i>The Wire</i></a>, is upon us. Every three episodes, we'll bring you a discussion of the series between <i>TAP Online</i> writers. This week, Spencer Ackerman kicks off our dialogue about episodes one, two, and three. <i>--The Editors</i> <b></b></p>
<p>Spencer Ackerman:<br />
Friends, we find ourselves at a point of crisis. The Iraq war nears its fifth anniversary. The global economy is somewhere between freak-out and meltdown. The Democratic presidential nomination fight is getting brutal. And <i>The Wire</i> -- the only TV show that matters, the salve that makes it all bearable -- sucks now, at least in the popular imagination.</p>
<p>Sunday is fast approaching, and ever since Episode Two aired, the consensus has been that the show's final season is a dreadful death rattle. At the screenings that Kriston, Matt, and I host, there's disbelief over both how heavy-handed the storytelling is and how thin the major plotlines of season five are. The <i>Baltimore Sun</i> plot -- in which a David Simon stand-in valiantly defends journalism against the ravages of clueless, avaricious editors and a fabricating star reporter -- might as well come equipped with white and black hats for the characters. Jimmy McNulty, driven over the edge by the <i>third</i> (!) disbanding of the Major Crimes Unit, is now tampering with crime scenes to invent a serial killer. And now he's aided by the truest Natural Police in Baltimore, Lester Freamon, who in many ways is the show's conscience. The show has, for the first time, an overabundance of exposition. No wonder that the blogs are going nuts. Over at <i>Slate</i>, David Plotz <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2181449/entry/2182356/">asked</a> Jeff Goldberg, "don't you think this nose dive is too much, too quickly?" He meant McNulty, but he captured the critics' judgment about the whole season to date. </p>
<p>And he's also totally wrong, as are the season-five haters. <i>The Wire</i>, on its own terms, has set up a strong foundation for its finale. It's morning in Baltimore, people. Wake up and smell the coffee. </p>
<p>First, have you noticed that everything <i>not</i> McNulty and <i>Sun</i>-related is pitch-perfect? Having dispatched the Barksdale empire (season three) and consolidated his hold on West Baltimore (season four), Marlo Stanfield's multi-front assault on Proposition Joe is brilliant. Marlo is trying to undercut the source of Proposition Joe's power -- his Greek connection and his access to information and laundered money -- and in the process, maneuvers Joe into complicity with his own would-be downfall. When we saw Chris looking up Sergei at the courthouse, we understood the <i>true</i> meaning of Marlo's query last season as to how Proposition Joe knows so much. Joe is trying to co-opt Marlo, and Marlo is trying to cripple Joe. Unlike with Barksdale, however, Marlo is now going against a master strategist. This is going to be epic -- particularly as both sides gear up to manipulate Omar, who can't be controlled. </p>
<p>Need more? How about the show's readiness to deliver on the biggest unresolved mystery: the unnamed trespass Cedric Daniels committed early in his career that Commissioner Burrell holds as a secret weapon? Or Michael's ambivalence over Marlo owning his soul? (God, how sublime was it to see Michael and Dukie giving each other daps after impressing the girls at the water park?) Or the impact of Clay Davis' indictment, particularly as Simon showed in episode three that the rarely seen ministers – Davis' partners, Burrell's protectors, Mayor Carcetti's uneasy allies -- are awash in drug money? Or how Bubbles' possible redemption means the loss of a crucial police informant? </p>
<p>OK, so it's cheap to argue that the show is great, except for its two major plot points. So let's take up McNulty. Episode three brought McNulty to the point of caricature: the overwrought self-destruction from serially cheating on Beadie, drinking at 10 in the morning in the interview room, and, most importantly, tampering with crime scenes and cold cases to invent his serial killer. For Lester to jump on board with Jimmy's plan just because it might somehow wake the bosses up didn't feel like a scene. It felt like a DVD outtake. </p>
<p>But consider that all our disbelief, objections and disappointments are voiced by Bunk. This is a big tell. Bunk stands in for the audience, thereby suggesting that we're in for some serious misdirection. Also consider that McNulty is acting <i>exactly</i> how <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200801/bowden-wire">the critics accuse David Simon himself of acting</a>. McNulty is, on the face of it, sacrificing everything that's given him the slightest bit of integrity in order to get some cheap revenge on his former bosses. Maybe, just maybe, David Simon, who's more than proven his mettle as a reporter, a writer and an artist, might <i>actually</i> possess an iota of self-awareness. Maybe a bunch of nervous critics and scribes and <i>Wire</i> fans aren't actually all smarter than the man who created the greatest show in the history of TV. </p>
<p>So finally: the <i>Sun</i> plotline. At the risk of undermining my earlier point, here I see little textual evidence to support the idea that this one is redeemable. It's unsubtle and upsetting, despite the <i>frisson</i> I get as a journalist over hearing <i>The Wire</i>'s characters talk about budget lines. I'm not inclined to defend it. But two points. First, it seems that by the end of episode three -- with the buyout scene and Scott fabricating a quote about Daniels -- the good reporter-bad reporter/boss distinction has gone as far as it can go without being subject to subversion. Sunday's episode may be a test case for whether the storyline is, indeed, bullshit. Second, I was in a <i>Wire</i> argument with two crusty reporter friends of mine last week, and one of them <i>liked</i> the fact that <a href="http://www.hbo.com/thewire/cast/characters/paper/thomas_klebanow.shtml">Klebanow</a> and <a href="http://www.hbo.com/thewire/cast/characters/paper/james_whiting.shtml">Whiting</a> are so transparently the Enemies of True Journalism. "I've <i>worked</i> for those fuckers," my friend said. I mostly resist his judgment, since it makes for a markedly less interesting drama. But there are some cases where an editor really is that vain, or that ignorant, or that malicious. Maybe realism sometimes demands a villain wear a black hat. Like I say, I mostly resist accepting the point, but it's something to think about. </p>
<p>So: who's going to argue that the show really does suck? Come at me with everything you've got. It's all in the game. </p>
<p><b>Matt Yglesias:</b><br />
One of the now-standard terms in which to praise <i>The Wire</i> is to note that it's so much more than a cop show. I think one of the things the dismal failure of the <i>Sun</i> plot reveals is the very real limits to this line of argument. Season one was a cop show -- the best-plotted, best-acted, most sophisticated cop show ever, but a cop show nonetheless. Season two broadened the focus to link the narrative on the streets to a narrative of economic decline. Season three brought high politics into the picture, arguing that not only do the strictures of police bureaucracy make effective work impossible, but the strictures of politics make reform impossible. And in season four we're reminded that to understand the kids in the streets we need to understand the younger kids in the middle schools. </p>
<p>But on to season five, it's simply not the case that to understand ghetto crime you need to understand the decline of metropolitan daily newspapers in mid-sized American cities. Simon happens to be interested in this issue because he used to work at one, and since a daily newspaper covers everything that happens in a city it's easy to make a media plotline intersect with a politics story, a crime story, an education story or whatever else. But an intersection is not the same as a rich, thematic entwinement and the story of crime in America and the story of the decline of the newspaper from its mid-century golden age are fundamentally different stories. Crime is much lower in urban America than it was 20 years ago despite steady erosion of daily papers like the <i>Sun</i>; these are simply separate questions. </p>
<p>But as long as Simon wants to be heavy-handed in his <i>Sun</i> narrative, it's worth noting that he errs badly -- at least so far -- in presenting the decline of the media entirely from the point of view of those who <i>produce</i> the news rather than the consumers. In episode three, we learn that the <i>Sun</i> will be shutting down its London bureau. Sad times for those who work there. But consider the situation of a typical Baltimorean interested in some news from Europe. In 1977, they could have relied on the <i>Sun</i>'s London bureau. Today, thanks to the genius of the internet, the London bureaux of <i>The New York Times</i>, <i>The Washington Post</i>, <i>The Wall Street Journal</i>, and for that matter the <i>Guardian</i> are at your finger tips. Individual newspapers are going into decline because they're facing increasing competition and newspaper chains are rationalizing their personnel. That's bad for newspaper writers, but it's <i>good</i> for newspaper readers. </p>
<p>But in Simon's telling, the newspaper seems to exist not to inform readers but to provide a venue for the witty banter of middle-aged male reporters. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, what happened to the uber-cautious Greek operation we saw in season two? Vondas meets, in person, with a guy he doesn't really know, in the same coffee shop they abandoned out of fear that the police were surveilling it, with a briefcase full of cash. Really? I mean, <i>we</i> know the cops have forgotten all about the Vondas and don't have any money anyway but it all seems a bit rushed -- Marlo could have been wearing a wire for all he knew. </p>
<p><b>Kay Steiger:</b><br />
To me, <i>The Wire</i>'s fifth season shows a division in the abilities of the writers. It's very, very hard to write about yourself well, and that shows in the newspaper subplot. They're falling into the trap of making it a morality tale: I was right and my buyout-wielding bosses were wrong. True as it may be that the newspaper industry has slowly been shooting themselves in the foot with cutbacks, it's heavy-handed way of putting it. Each episode reads like a skit in a journalism class. Don't fire your best reporters. Don't make up quotes. Know the backstory behind important city players. </p>
<p>In watching the early episodes of this season, what I miss most is the characters from last season that made the show great: Cutty, Naimon, Randy, and Colvin. Kima really hasn't had much of a presence since season two, and Chris and Snoop are flat, maniacal killers. Even Clay Davis isn't very interesting beyond his catchphrase, "shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeet." The most interesting storylines remain about the drug dealers and addicts on the street. I agree with Spencer that the plotline between Marlo and Prop Joe is interesting. I'm glad to see they're bringing Omar back. And I can't wait to see what the do with Bubbles, who is clearly still dealing with his addiction. </p>
<p>The thing is, Simon and the other writers don't really have much to add to the story of the decline of the American newspaper. It's a heavily discussed topic in other places, and done with more nuance and sophistication elsewhere. What the writers do have to add is the little-discussed topic of how low-income people feel about living in a place that no one really gives a shit about. The great thing the other seasons offered was the horrors of everyday life and great satisfaction in small victories. As of yet, this season seems to have strayed far from that focus. Furthermore, they've pretty much given up on the "small victories" part of the bargain, leaving the show pretty depressing to watch. Simon thus far seems inclined to go out with an "everything's fucked" attitude. It's kinda true, but it doesn't make very good TV. </p>
<p><b>Ann Friedman:</b><br />
What I find most disappointing about season five so far is, as Kay points out, the amount of time spent focusing on flat characters. I'm not that interested in one-dimensional killers like Marlo, Chris, and Snoop. I couldn't care less about Clay Davis, who pops up now and again like the silly comic relief in a Disney cartoon. The newspaper reporters -- who, as others have pointed out, all fit easily into either Good and Evil categories -- are just caricatures. And speaking of caricatures, WTF is up with McNulty? I'm not talking about the crime-scene tampering. I'd be OK with his character doing all of this over-the-top stuff if the writers gave us a more rounded look at what's really going on with him. After a whole season where McNulty focused on getting a "real life," we're back to seeing a McNulty who exists in a vacuum. They seem to have erased Beadie because they just don't have the <i>time</i> to deal with her. </p>
<p>Which gets to what is, I think, a root problem with season five. At this point, the show has so many subplots going that it's impossible to do them all justice. While a few plots from previous seasons have been let go, the writers have still got to wrangle with McNulty, Daniels, Carcetti, Marlo and Prop Joe, the Greeks, Bubs, Michael, Omar... on and on. It's a lot to cover in only 10 episodes. Honestly, I want to see them lose the Bubs story line. I'm bored. And they should devote the precious minutes they save to more air time for Michael -- not just because he's the type of character the <i>Wire</i> writers do best (conflicted street kid), but because he's far and away the most interesting person in the show right now. </p>
<p>I get what Spencer's saying about the potential for an epic finale when Marlo's plotting comes to a head and Burrell lets loose with Daniels' secrets. And I'm excited that Omar's coming back. So this season is definitely redeemable. Hey, before its over, the <i>Baltimore Sun</i> editors might even remember this is 2008, and deign to mention this thing called "the internet." </p>
<p><b>Kay Steiger:</b><br />
I think Ann is right. Marlo has been built up as the ultimate evil street lord. Unlike Avon and Stringer, Marlo, Snoop, and Chris are flat. We don't know anything about them beyond their maniacal ability to kill. Furthermore, they're falling neatly into stereotypes of cold and greedy drug dealers. Sure, there's family history with Marlo and Prop Joe, but it's thin backstory at best. What made <i>The Wire</i> great was that we could identify with Avon and Stringer. They may have done bad things, but they had skill, they played by the rules, and they protected their people. Stringer was a better example of this because he was a truly brilliant business man who happened to be in a deadly business. </p>
<p>Part of the problem is that when they develop really good personal stories (Ann gave the example of McNulty and Beadie), they don't quite know what to do with them. The same happened with Kima and her girl. These relationships fell apart because they <i>had</i> to. After all, they couldn't possibly create a compelling series with interesting relationships <i>and</i> interesting plots. That would be too much of a stretch. </p>
<p>Furthermore, I've noticed a significant lack of development among female characters. True, the worlds Simon and the other writers create are dominated by men, but effort to develop the female characters on the show is half-assed at best. It's frustrating to see a show that's so great at finally giving talented black male actors interesting characters to play while leaving the women at the wayside. Most of the time, the female characters are instrumental. (Have we <i>ever</i> seen Bunk's wife? If we did, I can't remember. All we know is that she's, um, whatever the female version of a cuckold is.) </p>
<p>It's a bit early to speculate about the end of the season, but the grand message may end up being that the street provides better justice than other institutions -- police, the courts, city council -- ever could. There's definitely potential for the series to get really good, but I think ultimately it will be difficult, especially with only 10 episodes, to really do justice to everything they started. </p>
<p><b>Ann Friedman:</b><br />
Amen to the lack of development of female characters! I don't care so much about Bunk's wife, but how could they <i>not</i> want to write a backstory to Snoop? And I still haven't totally forgiven the writers for all but dropping Kima after season two. </p>
<p><b>Matt Yglesias:</b><br />
Women characters have clearly always been the show's Achilles heel. I felt this most acutely, however, in season four where the focus on kids naturally put the spotlight on their relationships with their mothers, and yet the writers couldn't really pull it off. I can't, however, see the case that Kima was all but dropped after season two -- I thought her rejection of domesticity in season three was one of the main thematic pillars of that story arc. Meanwhile, if you want to talk about long-suffering under-developed characters, you've got to pay respect to Leander Sydnor. </p>
<p>I couldn't disagree more, however, about Marlo, Chris, and Snoop. Yes, all three are flat and affect-less in their <i>demeanors</i>, but to me that only lends depth to the moments when the facade breaks. You can't really understand the characters unless you attend to those moments; recall Chris' ferocious beat-down of Bug's abusive dad and the intense pettiness of Marlo, relieving his frustration over his poor poker play by deliberately provoking the security guard into a confrontation in order to generate the necessary pretext to order his death. Stringer and Avon were brighter characters, but in their way they were colder, more calculating, more practical, more money-driven hoods. Marlo, Chris, and Snoop, by contrast, are all chasing some very strange demons -- they are, in effect, sociopaths who kill for fun and are running a violent drug organization more because it affords them opportunities to murder than they are drug dealers who kill people for money. Any backstory you could possibly dramatize for Snoop would, meanwhile, almost certainly be a disappointment: why not let the imagination run wild? </p>
<p><b>Spencer Ackerman:</b><br />
Ann and Kay, I'm surprised to read that you don't care about Marlo, Chris and Snoop. They may be maniacal killers, but they're neither flat nor one-dimensional. Let me expand on Matt's points. </p>
<p>So the first thing we know about Marlo is his overwhelming interest in power and his disinterest in everything else. To use Kay's contrast with Avon and Stringer: the telling scene with them was in season three, when Stringer buys Avon an apartment and they celebrate all the possessions that their empire has brought them by reminiscing about being project kids who robbed toy stores. Marlo, in season four, catches a security guard staring at him at a Kwik-E-Mart, so he steals two lollipops just for the pleasure of humiliating (and then murdering) the guard, who has no choice but to accost him. Contrast clearly made. </p>
<p>The next question, of course, is <i>why</i> Marlo is the way he is, and why his organization is the way it is. And there I'd submit that Marlo is the wages of the drug game. In other words, while he's not in a literal sense the next generation of drug dealer, he is in a <i>logical</i> sense. The heroin and crack epidemics that Avon, Prop Joe, etc. exploit raised the stakes for survival among the younger crowd. As many sociologists have observed, crack in the 1980s (and into the 1990s in Baltimore) disproportionately affected the female population, meaning that the streets had to raise a generation of parentless children. (Avon, by contrast, comes from a drug-dealer dynasty.) What the Barksdales did to Baltimore is create the conditions for feral children like Marlo. This is why Marlo's story had to have been told in season four: in an important sense, he <i>is</i> one of the kids at Ida B. Wells. Relationships outside a core group -- Chris, Snoop, Fruit, the guy whose name I don't know who shot Cutty -- are purely transactional. They look at the game and place a higher value on what they need rather than what they want: Drugs and murder are ways to get money, and money is a way to get power and respect. Later for the man-toys. That's why it's hilarious when Marlo occasionally conducts his business in Rim Source. He could not care less about throwing any D's on his Cadillac. </p>
<p>You may not think Marlo is interesting as a character. But as a case study, he's fascinating. The show implies that what comes <i>after</i> Marlo -- who, as McNulty properly notes in episode three, is a mass murderer -- may be worse. That's what's at stake with Michael in season five. </p>
<p>Chris and Snoop reinforce the point -- or at least Chris does. I don't see how you can say Chris is a flat character. Remember the only time he breaks discipline? It's when he murders Michael's stepfather with his bare hands. Clearly something <i>very</i> bad happened to Chris at the hands of a father figure, and quite possibly drugs were an accelerant. (And, yeah, Chris now deals out the same horror. As Ice-T once rapped about the game, "You got me twisted, jammed into a paradox.") He has a commonality with Michael that leads to the closest thing Chris can come to compassion. This is a cold-blooded killer we're talking about. That doesn't resonate with you? And Snoop -- yeah, we need more of her backstory. We know she's a lesbian. (Bunk: "I'm thinkin' 'bout some pussy." Snoop: "Yeah, me too.") There's the implication that she smokes crack. (Chris to Michael: "Don't pay her no mind when she's on that shit.") You're right that we definitely need to know more about why Snoop is the way she is, especially considering how shallowly <i>The Wire</i> treats female characters. But look deeper at what the Stanfield crew represents. All the pieces matter. </p>
<p><b>Kay Steiger:</b><br />
That's all very interesting thought about Marlo, but I didn't see any of that development in the writing or the show. At this point I'd say it's all speculation. I found Stringer and Avon far more compelling characters because they seemed more human to me. They both had narratives. Marlo, I find very little to grasp on to, at least so far. </p>
<p>As for Chris, yes, the one interesting time he broke was when he killed Michael's brother's dad with his bare hands. (I still can't figure out if Michael was telling the truth or not when he sent Snoop and Chris to kill him.) Clearly something <i>bad</i> did happen in Chris's past to make him do such a thing. That was a sliver of character in a vast sea of blank face. But again, Snoop and Chris just don't talk much, we don't see them much, and they tend to serve a role that is purely one of driving the plot. We don't know why Snoop kills other than if we look to her own autobiography. The writers have left us cold. </p>
<p>I'm not saying that I've made up my mind about which set of characters will ultimately be better. There's still a lot of time for the story to unfold. But so far I've found the bad guys pretty disappointing. Spencer and Matt, I just don't see how they're more appealing than Stringer and Avon yet. </p>
<p>Spencer, what I do think is interesting is that you're starting to look at this show from a sociologist's perspective. As David Simon <a href="http://www.campusprogress.org/features/1273/five-minutes-with-david-simon">said</a> in an interview with former <i>TAP Online</i> editor Sam Rosenfeld over at my place, Campus Progress, "Those are places where money and capitalism have achieved everything they can. This is the America that got left behind." <i>That</i> is what made me fall in love with <i>The Wire</i> in the first place and that is what I long to return. Sure, there's plenty of disillusionment, but it may get so far "down in the hole" I may not be able to care enough about it anymore. Maybe I'm what's wrong with America, but writers need to capture people we can relate to make us care. </p>
<p><b>Ezra Klein:</b><br />
In some ways, I think the problems with the female characters are evidence of the root problem in this season: The writers don't write human relationships well. <i>The Wire</i>'s unparalleled success is in telling the stories of individuals interactions with <i>institutions.</i> And their great innovation has been to expand the definition of institution into any environment that has rules, and use that frame to show how the pathologies of the street and the schools and the police department and the city bureaucracy are parallel, and when they're not parallel, they're actually reinforcing each other. </p>
<p>This is classic Simon. Recall the city editor Gus's argument with the cartoonishly craven editor-in-chief during the story meeting: We can't focus on the schools alone, he said, we need to zoom out, show how the families impact the kids impact the schools impact the streets. Everything needs context, to be considered in terms of the whole, not viewed as an isolated part. If you read the <a href="http://www.cjr.org/cover_story/secrets_of_the_city.php?page=all"><i>Columbia Journalism Review</i> article</a> about Simon's fights with editors, it's the same riff. They wanted to narrow the scope, have more impact by choosing discrete problems to attack. He wanted to widen it, showcase more honesty even if it came at expense of focus. </p>
<p>This brings us to the problems in the season. Simon's institution is failing him. The newsroom, at this point, feels like a checklist of personal grievances and long-remembered slights. Gus is too good, the ambitious fabulist too bad, the cost-cutting editor too buffoonish. Worse, the problems Simon's pointing out just aren't very interesting. Layoffs suck, it's true. Doing more with less is a stupid slogan. But so far, what's the harm? If the schools fail, if the streets kill, if the bureaucracy corrupts, if the cops misstep, the harm is obvious. But if the newsroom cuts back? As a journalist, that's bad for me, and I can't make an argument as to why it's bad for you. But it's a more indirect problem, and Simon is, uncharacteristically, dramatizing it with an unrelated problem, which is fabulism. So the viewer is supposed to believe that the belt-tightening has resulted in lying journalist who concocted a fake disabled kid to add color to a story on a baseball game (though, as the show set up last week, a faked quote may end up pitting Burrell against Daniels, which will tie them in more directly). </p>
<p>The institution Simon has picked is failing him, or he's failing it. Meanwhile, the show, at this point, is overpopulated. And for reasons slightly unclear to me, Simon is making this season a reunion of sorts. So not only do we have the cops, the kids, the politicians, the newspapermen, the drug co-op, and Marlo's gang, but we're also back with Avon, Omar, and the Greeks. And since this season really isn't about their institutions, it has to be about their personal interactions (Avon extorting Marlo, say, or Omar returning out of love for Butchie). And Simon and Co. just aren't good at writing personal interactions. It's the same problem they had with the women: They never gave them real roles relating to their institutions (Kima doesn't battle the bureaucracy like McNulty does, and Carcetti's wife never interacts with City Hall), so they had to give them human storylines. And because they're bad at writing those, and they sensed that, they generally let them drop. But now, with so many characters and so little to actually say about the newsroom, those stories are front and center. And so, for the same reason the writers couldn't write women, they're proving unable to write this season. </p>
<p><b>Kriston Capps:</b><br />
Character development by way of backstory is unlikely in this series. Structurally, the series doesn't afford much opportunity for backstory: no narrator, no flashbacks, and (until season five) almost nothing in the way of hand-holding expository dialog. Previously Simon has used dramatic gestures to lead viewers to certain conclusions about his characters -- sometimes to great effect. In season four we see a shadow pass behind Chris's eyes when Michael asks him to do in Bug's abusive father; the extraordinary violence Chris lends to the task is personal retaliation. Over the course of the season we've seen the broken system that Chris grew up in. Given what we are led to understand about his personal demons, the suggestion that (as Yglesias suggests) his sociopathy amounts to <i>mere</i> mania -- as if that were a narrative flaw -- short-sells Chris (and Marlo and Snoop), who effectively introduce the problem of evil. They aren't driven by a profit motive; indeed, their interests seem inhuman. When Marlo snookers police by staging various hookups with girls, David Simon is flirting with the audience, tweaking the viewer's desire to find some weakness in Marlo and company (if even just to predict Marlo's downfall). But that's not what those characters are there for. </p>
<p>But those are the accomplishments of season four, before the captains of hell skip off to the Caribbean. In season five, the fiction is distressingly similar to the truth. Far from seeming unreal, the hailstorm of corporate directives that pelt the <i>Baltimore Sun</i> newsroom sound all too familiar. The newspaper I write for has recently been bought by an out-of-touch corporate conglomerate, who has since purged staff, cut features, and reduced page count from 120-odd to fewer than 90. Simon's newsroom under siege is pitch perfect to my ear. That's a problem. There's less artistry and more anecdote to the threads concerning the <i>Sun</i>. So far, the problems in the newsroom have not proven to be the intractable structural problems that plague the streets, government, and police force. It's early yet but as a structural problem, the news doesn't hang with death and taxes. </p>
<p>Maybe (as Spencer suggests) Simon is tanking the show's leading man in order to make his turnaround absolutely compelling later, but McNulty's arc won't be any more believable for it. At the end of the third episode, I felt a sick glimmer of hope. No way would Lester Freamon bite; caught up on his plan, Freamon decidees to take McNulty for a ride. He convinces McNulty that the scenes need to suggest not just crime but <i>depravity</i> in order to attract the media's attention. Would it restore Bunk to all his fraternal glory to know that Freamon had planted in McNulty the suggestion that by tampering with dead bodies -- so to speak -- McNulty will save Baltimore? It's a prank worthy of Freamon's genius, anyway. Sadly, I don't find it any more likely than the notion that Simon has adopted strategies like intentional inconsistency and unpredictability in order to make some meta commentary about Baltimore. </p>
<p><b>Ann Friedman:</b><br />
I suppose I should have been clearer: I don't want to see flashbacks of Chris or Snoop's childhood, but I <i>would</i> like to see more telling moments, more allusions to their past. Yeah, yeah, I know we got a little snippet of info about Chris in the scene where they kill Bug's father. Everyone has brought that up. But I want to see more cracks in the facade. I want to see more tension between these sociopaths. Something to make Marlo's gang half as interesting as Barksdale's. Yeah, yeah, I know they're sociopaths, they're cold, they don't exactly share their feelings with each other. Fine! I accept that. But this show is also supposed to be entertainment. Would it really hurt the writers all that much to give us a bit more to go on with Marlo, Chris and Snoop? That's all I'm asking. </p>
<p><b>Ezra Klein:</b><br />
Like Ann, I could use a bit more with Marlo, though I think Chris and Snoop are more fleshed out. We can reasonably infer, I think, that Chris saved Snoop, much as he's "saving" Michael. There are fates worse than murderer out there. Marlo, though, is just an monstrous automaton. From the season four episode in which he meets a girl in a bar and gets a blowjob with no evident pleasure to his crazed lashing out at the security guard, there's not even been a flash of vulnerability -- or even pleasure -- behind those eyes. And that's the problem. For <i>The Wire</i>, the parallels are important. Avon and Stringer could have been McNulty and Lester. Marlo, though, has been made into a sociopath -- an evil we want stopped. In that way, he's an utterly aberrant character, unlike anyone else on the show. Simon, I suspect, won't stop him, and may even use him to kill off the beloved Omar, all the better to advance his nihilistic, unrelentingly grim vision. But in making Marlo the apotheosis of a particular outlook rather than, like everyone else, a character, I fear Simon has erred. </p>
<p>As for McNulty, I think the rapid deterioration of his character has to be understood as submission to Simon's vendetta against the newsroom. McNulty's fabricated serial killer will wind up on the front pages, because newspaper cutbacks combined with newsroom sensationalism will buy into anything. This will cause all sort of problems and dramatize the effect of an absent press. It will also destroy everything that was interesting and worthwhile about the McNulty character. I'd say it's all in the game, but I fear, for Simon, this season is more than a game. It's a grudge.</p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 25 Jan 2008 18:38:33 +0000146962 at http://prospect.orgSpencer AckermanPetraeus '12http://prospect.org/article/petraeus-12
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>The world -- at least the world of the U.S. military -- is General David Petraeus' oyster. Nearly a year after Petraeus assumed command of Multinational Force-Iraq, as the military command in Baghdad is known, violence is <a href="http://www.mcclatchydc.com/iraq/story/25074.html">ebbing</a> <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/17/AR2008011703437.html?wpisrc=_rssworld/mideast/iraq">back</a> <a href="http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/2008/01/female_suicide_bomber_kills_9.php">up</a>, sectarian reconciliation remains <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/14/world/middleeast/14iraq.html?_r=1&amp;ex=1358053200&amp;en=cdbdbba81259f4f2&amp;ei=5088&amp;partner=rssnyt&amp;emc=rss&amp;oref=slogin">deadlocked</a>, and the surge is coming to an end. Yet Petraeus' reputation as a miracle worker is as assured as it ever was -- and before that changes, Petraeus is eyeing an exit from Baghdad. <i>Tout</i> Washington is trying to figure out where he'll work his magic next. "Trying to guess General Petraeus' next assignment is the most popular parlor game in the Pentagon these days," department spokesman Geoff Morrell <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/21/washington/21military.html?_r=1&amp;hp&amp;oref=slogin">told</a> <i>The New York Times</i> for a piece yesterday exploring Petraeus' options. </p>
<p>Indeed, Petraeus can basically write his next round of orders. But wherever he goes, his next important campaign probably won't be on any battlefield. It'll be political. For the past year, the GOP has laid the groundwork to enlist Petraeus as its standard-bearer in the fairly likely event that the party loses in November to Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. You read it here first. Plant your lawn signs now. Petraeus 2012: Surging to the White House. </p>
<p>Petraeus emerged from his first two assignments in Iraq -- commanding the 101st Airborne Division from 2003 to 2004 and then the training of Iraqi security forces from 2004 to 2005 -- as the only general to leave the war with his reputation enhanced. But in 2007, the GOP turned him into a demigod. The surgeniks at <i>The Weekly Standard</i> led the charge. Just days after Petraeus arrived in Baghdad, editor Bill Kristol <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/013/236diejk.asp">hectored </a> GOP senators against scaling back the war as "anti-surge, anti-Petraeus, anti-troops, and anti-victory." At the time, Petraeus was well-respected in Washington and in military circles but still an obscure figure, making Kristol's invocation somewhat curious. But embattled war supporters -- including President Bush -- saw an opportunity: They could hold the line on Iraq by transforming Bush's War into Petraeus' War. Petraeus is a talented general. But he needed to become a legend. </p>
<p>The mythmaking reached its fever pitch during Petraeus' defining September 2007 war testimony. Hard as it may be to remember now, in September, the surge hadn't delivered on its promise of engendering Iraqi political resolutions. Yet an ill-advised ad by the liberal group MoveOn.org excoriating "General Betray Us" allowed GOP legislators to transform a hearing on the war's questionable progress into a defense of Petraeus' professionalism and virtue. Enabled by a supine press corps, a political persona -- the legendary warrior enduring the slings and arrows of invidious antiwar forces -- was born. Ironically, the "Betray Us" locution originated in 2003 with Pentagon civilians who disapproved of Petraeus' reluctance to purge Sunnis from the government in Mosul or close the border with Syria. Those days, needless to say, are long forgotten. One of the more perfervid neocon sheets, <i>The New York Sun</i>, ran an editorial in September headlined, <a href="http://www.nysun.com/article/62017">"Petraeus For President?"</a> The question mark was unnecessary. </p>
<p>But it was also premature. The rationale for a Petraeus candidacy depends on the GOP coalition fracturing under the weight of the war -- something that hasn't happened yet. In the event of a Republican loss in November, the party will have to come to terms with the legacy of the war. The most politically advantageous way of doing that will be to draft a symbol of the Iraq war as it might have been: engineered and executed not by the hidebound ideologues and incompetents of the Bush administration, but by a nimble, dexterous warrior-scholar. It's true that John McCain has made the surgenik critique of the war for a long time. But it's a whole new political world when articulated by the man responsible -- in the media's imagination, at least -- with the war's belated redemption. </p>
<p>So what the GOP faithful have done, whether by design or by accident, is to signal that they're Petraeus' natural political allies. And with the left souring on Petraeus as he commands the war, they're not entirely wrong to do so. As a result, when Petraeus decides to retire, he'll do so as a war hero with a sterling reputation among establishment Washington and as a deity on the right. The war will still be a disaster, but the GOP strategy of lionizing Petraeus means he'll be remembered not as a man who helped mitigate an irredeemable disaster, but as a miracle maker. He'll be in his late 50s. Expect his retirement by mid-2010. </p>
<p>Petraeus has said publicly that he won't run for president. "I think that General Sherman had it right when he gave what is now commonly referred to as a Shermanesque response when asked a similar question," he <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,318049,00.html">told</a> Chris Wallace last month. Don't believe him. Not many people can resist such the temptation of an out-of-power political party practically begging him or her to run for president as a conquering hero. </p>
<p>A Democratic president, in short, should expect that in four years, Petraeus is coming for her or him. So what's to be done? </p>
<p>Under no circumstances can Petraeus be fired. For one thing, the military remains wary of Democrats in general. Although the senior officer corps has mixed feelings about Petraeus -- his ambition is a bit off-putting to his peers -- it's going to be looking for Bill Clinton-style signs of disrespect or discomfort with the military. That's exactly how they'll interpret a Petraeus firing, and an untested president dealing with two wars can't afford the resulting uniformed acrimony. For another, the political ramifications of a newly elected Democratic president -- even riding a crest of either antiwar fervor or public exhaustion with the war -- firing a sainted general would leave Petraeus in the strongest possible position to mount a challenge. </p>
<p>Leaving Petraeus in Baghdad -- presuming that President Bush doesn't reassign him before leaving the White House -- isn't without risks, either. First, his extremely sophisticated cultivation of the press (<i>Time</i> nearly made him its <a href="http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/personoftheyear/article/0,28804,1690753_1695388_1695379,00.html">Person of the Year</a>) means that there's no shortage of reporters willing to print stories about how civilian politicians are tying the hands of the military in Iraq just when it needs maximum flexibility. Second, commanding Multinational Forces-Iraq doesn't carry a set term. Petraeus can submit his resignation any time he wants. The reason doesn't really matter. He can exit either during a time of quiet, when he can say that he's leaving on success, or during a time of chaos, when he can say that the politicians have stopped him from doing his job. Then, out of uniform, he's free to run for president. </p>
<p>That leaves an unconventional option. The president can give Petraeus a promotion he can't refuse. There are really only three that suit the bill: Petraeus can either become commander of all forces in the Middle East; NATO commander (as the <i>Times</i> reported may soon happen); or chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. While the chairman is on paper the military's senior officer, it may not be the right post for Petraeus, since the job is outside the military chain of command. It would be shrewder to give Petraeus one of the two most prestigious command assignments in the military as the final assignment of his career. (The military would probably see that as more respectful move, as well.) Putting Petraeus at Central Command would have an added benefit for a Democratic president: he would be tasked with overseeing a plan to draw troops down from Iraq, thereby making him complicit in the undoing of his chief political advantage. And there's another advantage to making Petraeus a regional commander: those jobs are five-year assignments. Should he prematurely resign his command to plan a presidential run, he'll both appear craven and be open to the charge of deserting his post in wartime. (As he would if he turned down any of the three assignments offered him.) </p>
<p>Naturally, none of this is foolproof. Predicting the outcome of the 2008 election is problematic. Gaming out the <i>2012</i> race is, admittedly, goofy. But the political danger to a Democratic president of a Petraeus Political Surge is real. Strategists might as well start planning accordingly. And if the president's aides don't like any of the listed anti-Petraeus options, there's always a Hail-Mary play: strike a deal with Jeb Bush to challenge Petraeus for the nomination. It's never too early to engineer a Surge of Dynastic Restoration. </p>
</div></div></div>Tue, 22 Jan 2008 19:12:06 +0000146951 at http://prospect.orgSpencer AckermanThe Coming Fight for Northern Iraqhttp://prospect.org/article/coming-fight-northern-iraq
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>Mosul was fairly calm earlier this year as winter gave way to spring. Some nights at Forward Operating Base Marez, the major U.S. garrison in the multiethnic northern Iraqi city, explosions would boom as incoming fire missed its target. But veteran officers, who remembered when Mosul briefly fell to the insurgency in late 2004, celebrated what passed for Iraqi tranquility. The city's central roundabouts featured something rare to see in Baghdad during that time: people milling about, selling produce, cut-rate electronics, and mountains of jeans on flatbeds and donkey carts. </p>
<p>That calm is now gone, as al-Qaeda in Iraq and rejectionist Sunni insurgents have opted to abandon surge-bloated Baghdad and <a href="http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_problem_with_militias"></a>Anbar, where Concerned Local Citizen militias have a strong presence, for a place where a single U.S. combat battalion protects a city of 1.7 million people. Back then, though, it was almost boring. </p>
<p>Something sinister lurked behind that boredom. The city's Kurds and Sunnis looked to a fateful referendum over control of Mosul scheduled for the end of the year. Known as the Article 140 referendum after the provision in Iraq's constitution decreeing it, the referendum would ask residents of mixed-ethnic northern Iraq if they'd rather be ruled by the Kurdish Regional Government rather than by Baghdad. Kurds I interviewed, sure they'd triumph in the vote, promised war if the referendum didn't occur on time. Sunnis I interviewed, convinced the Kurds were right, promised war if it did. With a week and a half left in 2007, it's clear the referendum isn't going to happen. And with both insurgents and foreign terrorists set up in Mosul, Kirkuk, and their surrounding provinces of Ninewa and Tamim, the next powder keg of the Iraq War is due to ignite. </p>
<p>Even in March, Sunnis felt besieged. The political center of the Sunni community in the city is the Iraqi Islamic Party (IIP), which doesn’t actually hold any elected offices. It boycotted the 2005 provincial elections, a decision that has left Sunnis vastly underrepresented on the provincial council and that has contributed to a Sunni sense of inevitability to Kurdish territorial advances. At a meeting with U.S. diplomats in the IIP's mosque-cum-headquarters in March, party officials matter-of-factly declared that if the referendum advances -- a concession that the Kurds will win it -- there would be violence. "We don't believe that if Article 140 is implemented in less than four years it'll be just," said Faris Yunis, a party official in a drab olive suit. "A lot of blood will be shed by this," added his colleague, Mohammed Shakir. "There are a lot of people willing to die for that cause." It probably wasn't a mere prognostication. The IIP in the city, U.S. officials told me, has significant ties to local insurgents. They also told me that if new elections were held in the province, Shakir would likely become Ninewa's governor. Yunis and Shakir, in other words, are in a position to take Mosul’s Sunnis to war. </p>
<p>Making matters worse, the Kurds are both dismissive of Sunni concerns and quick to promise retaliation if the referendum doesn’t happen. It’s a position borne of the justifiable Kurdish grievance over Saddam Hussein’s ethnic cleansing of northern Iraq, and of their current U.S.-guaranteed political dominance in the area. The current governor, Duraid Qashmoula, is a Sunni brought to power by the Kurds, and he displays his loyalty. If the referendum takes place, "there will be no confrontation, no violence," he said, smoking a Pine cigarette in his office. "If I take over someone else's house and the owner asks for it back, what's wrong with that?" His vice governor, Khasro Goran, is a Kurd and is more direct about the stakes. "Article 140 is a constitutional article," he said. "If that article is not implemented, another violent front will open -- not just a Shiite-Sunni front but also a Kurd-Sunni Arab front. It's much better to solve the problem now." Asked about the IIP's request to delay the referendum, he said, "Their goal is not to delay implementation, but to kill the whole article." For good measure, Goran said the IIP "does not represent the Sunni Arabs at all, only a small sect." </p>
<p>The stakes of the referendum are as simple as they are large. A map printed by the Kurdish Ministry of Tourism earlier this year and given to me by anti-Kurdish political forces shows what the Kurds envision as their post-referendum frontiers. (When I presented it to Goran, the vice governor only contested minor portions of it.)<img vspace="5" hspace="10" align="left" src="/galleries/img_articles/kurdish_state.jpg" alt="" /> Mosul would run along the southwestern quasi-border with Baghdad-controlled Iraq. And it's hardly the only city up for grabs. So is Kirkuk, the historic heart of Iraq's oil development. The loss of Kirkuk means the loss of billions of dollars in revenue for Baghdad, and the gain of Kirkuk will dramatically accelerate the viability of an independent Kurdistan. That is exactly why the Baghdad government has favored delay at all costs. </p>
<p>It's a smart strategy. Since Kurdish independence requires a measure of goodwill from both the region and the broader international community, the Kurds can't afford to be seen as the aggressors in a battle to redraw the boundaries of the Kurdistan Regional Government southward. That means the Kurds are boxed in. Last week, KRG Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani -- son of Kurdish potentate Massoud Barzani, ruler of Irbil and Dohuk provinces -- came to Baghdad as a supplicant over Article 140 and got nothing. "What is important is that we emphasized during the meeting that the Kurds, as part of Iraq, wanted to resolve the problems in a brotherly manner and through dialogue," he gamely said after meeting with Shiite politicians. He could say little else. </p>
<p>But what the Kurds can do is influence the facts on the ground. Kurdish authorities have relocated unknown thousands of Kurds from the Kurdistan Regional Government into the disputed cities. The soccer stadium in Kirkuk is now home to over 2,000 Kurds living in squalor simply so they can throw the vote to Irbil, the Kurdish capitol. "By God’s name, they would cut off our food basket and not pay us our salary and give us nothing else and force us to go back," Hajji Walid Muhammad, a 67-year-old Kurdish cab driver <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/world/middleeast/09kirkuk.html?em&amp;ex=1197435600&amp;en=262c56e085210596&amp;ei=5087%0A">explained</a> to <i>The New York Times</i>. "They ordered us to go back." Kurdish coercion is not limited to the Kurds' own citizens. In March, Chaldean Christians in the ancient city of al-Kosh in Ninewa Province told U.S. diplomats that Kurdish pesh merga commanders had threatened them if they didn't vote to join the KRG in the referendum. One barometric indication of the balance of power is the Yazidi minority. Victims of one of the year's worst terrorist attacks, a blast that killed 500 near the Iraq-Syria border, the Yazidis have throughout history identified as either Arab or Kurdish, depending on whoever offered protection. They presently back the Kurds on the referendum. </p>
<p>So it's no surprise that the Baghdad government would opt to scrap the referendum rather than lose Mosul, Kirkuk, and other northern cities to Irbil. Of course, that means Nouri al-Maliki is now in the dubious position of violating the constitution, relegating the already-shaky rule of law in Iraq another casualty of the territorial dispute. It's a textbook example of how a hasty democratization process leads to political failure. Without clear, consistent, and applied standards for resolving the dispute, violence is inevitable. Concern is building in the international community. The United Nations' new Iraq troubleshooter, Staffan de Mistura, recently commented, "Not just for technical reasons but also for political ones, there is a need to look at a formula that will maintain the [referendum] process, and will not put it on the back burner." </p>
<p>Unlike in March, a new actor in Ninewa is ready to exploit Arab-Kurdish tensions: al-Qaeda. U.S. military commanders have recently observed a spike in violence in the disputed cities, particularly in Mosul, and attributed it to insurgents and foreign terrorists driven north to escape the surge forces. "We have seen some migration of al-Qaeda," Colonel Steph Twitty, who commanded U.S. forces in Mosul when I was there, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/world/middleeast/06mosul.html?_r=1&amp;oref=slogin">told</a> <i>The New York Times.</i> al-Qaeda and Sunni insurgents portray themselves as "the defenders of Sunni interests against Kurdish expansionism," the paper reported, making a conflagration all the more likely. Unlike Sunnis in Anbar, Sunnis in Ninewa have not felt al-Qaeda's social repression and so may have little disincentive to embracing al-Qaeda in the face of a perceived Kurdish threat. What's true of Mosul is doubly so in Kirkuk, which has hovered on the precipice of violent collapse for years. </p>
<p>Managing Arab-Kurdish acrimony in northern Iraq was always going to be a massive undertaking. In March it appeared merely ominous. With the insurgency taking root in Ninewa, it appears far worse. And with the surge forces drawing down over the next year, simply no more U.S. troops can be brought into Iraq to augment the roughly 1,000 currently in Mosul without transferring them from a different part of the country. U.S. commanders speak of bolstering Iraqi forces in the city in the event of increased sectarian violence. Those forces -- guaranteed -- will not be peacekeepers but active combatants in an Arab-Kurdish feud. And as soon as northern Iraq ignites, no political room in Baghdad will exist for any of the <i>other</i> arduous compromises needed for a broader reconciliation. </p>
<p>In days, the Kurds will be faced with a decision: What will they do now that there isn't going to be a referendum? Perhaps the Kurds will back off their more violent promises and try to secure their referendum next year. But that only delays the reckoning that will occur if and when the Kurds take Mosul and Kirkuk. And the U.S. won’t have many options for response if they do. Does Washington turn against its closest Iraqi ally or does it preside over what Arab Iraqis will justly see as the dismemberment of Iraq? Whatever choice the Bush administration makes, one thing is clear: Last March’s placidity was really just a period of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoney_War">phony war</a>. </p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 20 Dec 2007 18:36:07 +0000146901 at http://prospect.orgSpencer AckermanExporting the Anbar Awakeninghttp://prospect.org/article/exporting-anbar-awakening
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>Imagine the Bush administration's war cabinet as a drunken gambler during a moment of sobriety-inducing panic. The fortune he thought he accumulated has proven illusory, and most of the money he brought to the casino is gone. His throat is dry and his head is pounding. The display of his cell phone shows numerous missed calls -- all from his wife, who begged him not to indulge his worst habits, and now pleads with him to come home. Three facts concentrate his addled mind: he is coated in shame, he is still in the casino, and he has a few dollars more. </p>
<p>He thinks for a moment. In the last few hands, he unexpectedly won a little cash. Hope swells in his heart. Something that he doesn't understand stopped him from losing <i>all</i> his money -- but what? Maybe he doesn't need to know. He can just ride it out -- on a different game, even -- and come home with something to show for the weekend. As long as he has just a little something in his pocket, he won't have to admit that he made a drastic mistake by gambling away his family's nest egg. A Joe Strummer lyric crackles through his brain: <i>Monday's coming like a jail on wheels</i>. If he's going to make a play, it has to be now. He jangles the chips in his pocket and summons the bartender. </p>
<p>It's hard not to think of a man without self-control when considering that the Bush administration might export the Anbar Awakening to Pakistan. <i>The New York Times</i> recently <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/19/washington/19policy.html?ex=1353128400&amp;en=dbc14fd701f7b8ab&amp;ei=5088&amp;partner=rssnyt&amp;emc=rss ">reported</a> that some in the U.S. military's Special Operations Command (SOCOM) believe the so-called Awakening -- where the U.S. exploited a 2006 cleavage between Sunni Iraqis and al-Qaeda -- offers a viable model for U.S. policy in the tribal areas of Pakistan that shelter Osama bin Laden. To do so would make our gambler look responsible by comparison as he slinks back to the craps table. So how can a plan so potentially calamitous merit serious debate? </p>
<p>Here's what's up for discussion. While Gen. Musharraf suppresses any possible moderate, civilian threat to his continued rule, the tribal areas in the west of his country, bordering Afghanistan, remain mostly outside his control. Autonomy for what the U.S. calls the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA, has been part of the Pakistani social compact since there's been a Pakistan. Invading -- or supporting a Pakistani Army conquest -- isn't an option, unless new waves of instability are to befall a nuclear-armed country. Yet within the FATA is, as a National Intelligence Estimate recently <a href="http://www.dni.gov/press_releases/20070717_release.pdf">concluded</a>, a "safehaven" for an increasingly powerful cohort of the original al-Qaeda's senior leadership, or "AQSL" in intelligence community parlance. So, the Pentagon figures, the best course of action is to buy off tribal figures in the FATA to shift their allegiances from AQSL and its Taliban partners; organize its young men into an anti-AQSL militia supported by the Pakistani Interior Ministry; and witness the extirpation of al-Qaeda in its most important redoubt. It'll require raising U.S. military profile in one of the least stable portions of the globe, but, hey, it worked in Anbar Province, right? </p>
<p>Put aside for the moment any doubts about the <a href="http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_problem_with_militias">long-term effects</a> of the Anbar Awakening. Stipulate that the Awakening is a good and worthy thing: After all, turning Muslims against al-Qaeda is the surest course to anything resembling victory in the war on terrorism. Even so, gambling on a FATA Awakening is still a poor idea. </p>
<p> The fundamental problem is one of causation. In 2006, al-Qaeda in Iraq declared something called the Islamic State of Iraq in Ramadi. It was a massive blunder, representing in effect the conquest of part of Iraq by a foreign entity. Long-simmering tensions between foreign jihadis and Sunni tribal figures and insurgents -- al-Qaeda would murder people for smoking cigarettes, for instance -- that had been suppressed in the name of fighting the U.S. and the Shiites boiled over. The U.S. military, led by counterinsurgency experts like Gen.l David Petraeus, was smart enough to distinguish between its true enemies (al-Qaeda) and its transactional ones (the Sunni insurgents) and to capitalize on the blunders of its true enemies. </p>
<p>In Pakistan, <i>nothing like this exists.</i> The FATA tribes show no sign of tensions with AQSL. The <i>Times</i> reported that many of the same tribes that would form the basis of a FATA Awakening still actively fight alongside the Taliban -- as do elements within the Interior Ministry that would be responsible for nurturing the Awakening. Within SOCOM, which has developed the proposal, analysts have no idea whether the tribes would accept or reject American support. In short, the basic strategic condition that allowed the Anbar Awakening to exist -- a split between Iraqis and al-Qaeda -- isn't in evidence here. All sorts of other potential problems arise: For one, this potential paramilitary tribal force, with its minimal control by Islamabad, wouldn't augur well for the internal stability of a nuclear-armed country. But without the basic FATA/AQSL split, it makes no sense to consider such second-order questions. And in that case, flooding the FATA with money and guns is about as wise as making a blank check out to Osama bin Laden. </p>
<p>Since the story broke, the SOCOM proposal has been greeted harshly. Phil Carter, an Iraq veteran and sensible national-security commentator, <a href="http://www.intel-dump.com/posts/1195488746.shtml">called</a> it a "formula for blowback," and compared it to arming the proto-Taliban of the anti-Soviet mujahideen in the 1980s. On the right, Bill Roggio <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/014/383wutvv.asp?pg=1">wrote</a> that absent direct U.S. military support, the plan "would be a death sentence for any tribe foolish enough to join the fight." Adm. Eric Olson, the SOCOM chief, is a well-respected military professional. How can he be hovering on the precipice of catastrophe? </p>
<p>That brings us back to the drunken gambler. The gambler stays at the casino because he hasn't hit bottom yet. Fortune has cursed him with what appears to be a small blessing: though he's lost so much, a few minor victories have convinced him that he's bouncing back. He is unable to distinguish between luck and strategy. </p>
<p>Olson, to be clear, isn't a drunken gambler. But the trauma of losing the Iraq War has introduced a loss of perspective for many in the U.S. defense establishment over the war's eleventh-hour fortunes. The Anbar Awakening is a case in point: The reasons for its apparent successes are little understood, and erode under scrutiny. It's much less traumatic to simply <i>proclaim</i> success confidently. And what better way to display confidence in the Awakening than to export it to a place where military options are limited and the margin for error is thin? </p>
<p>Arming the Pakistani tribes is less about Pakistan or AQSL than about proving a point concerning Iraq. If it seems unwise or inappropriate, that's because its wisdom is incidental and its propriety doesn't enter into the equation. And like all desperate attempts at doubling down when gambling strategies fail, its application is a surefire way to hit the awful bottom that all sane people spend their lives trying to avoid. </p>
</div></div></div>Tue, 27 Nov 2007 18:01:12 +0000146838 at http://prospect.orgSpencer AckermanThe Problem with Militiashttp://prospect.org/article/problem-militias-0
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>Everywhere you go in Iraq, there's victory. The commander of U.S. forces in Baghdad, Maj. Gen. Joseph Fil, told reporters last Wednesday that he had wiped al-Qaeda in Iraq <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/08/world/middleeast/08iraq.html?ex=1352264400&amp;en=fae5dec594002dd9&amp;ei=5088&amp;partner=rssnyt&amp;emc=rss">out of the city</a>. Stability in Iraq is "within sight, but not yet within touch," he said. And while categorical statements about progress have come back to haunt U.S. officials, commanders are evincing more certainty about the possibilities of success than they would ever have dared prior to Gen. David Petraeus' September testimony. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has gone even further, <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/middleeastCrisis/idUSL05388170">proclaiming</a> "victory against terrorist groups and militias." It's pretty bewildering, even for <a href="http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=good_news_for_iraq">those</a> who've seen some recent reasons for cautious optimism. </p>
<p>Perhaps the only voice of caution over the last two weeks has been Ambassador Ryan Crocker. When last Crocker drew attention, it was during his shared testimony with Petraeus, in which he showed a surprising eagerness to lie about the pace with which sectarian reconciliation had advanced. These days, he's warning of a looming danger -- militias taking over the mechanics of running Iraq. Using the military's acronym for Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, Crocker recently <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSCOL55146220071025?pageNumber=1">mused</a>, "We have seen JAM Militant transform into JAM Incorporated. They may not be shooting at us or Iraqi soldiers, but [they are] controlling gas stations, real estate, trade and services. … That is a major challenge to the state." </p>
<p>Right Crocker is. But if he recognized how his observation undermined his colleagues' declarations of victory, he didn't show it. Consider the case of the newest militias on the block -- the so-called Concerned Local Citizens, a mostly Sunni collection of ex-insurgents and rejections that's responsible for much of the spring in the steps of U.S. officials. The CLCs represent the U.S.' first attempt at actually creating Iraqi militias, and U.S. officials are enthusiastic about the effort. Few seem to have noticed that everything Crocker says about the "major challenge" posed by the militias applies to U.S.-friendly militias as much as it does to U.S.-opposed militias. And yet, these new militias are, in large part, the basis for the success that U.S. and Iraqi officials are claiming. </p>
<p>The single largest contribution to the perception among U.S. commanders that stability is "within sight" is the Sunni rejection of al-Qaeda in Iraq that began in Ramadi last October. David Kilcullen, the counterinsurgency expert and Petraeus confidante, <a href="http://www.smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2007/08/anatomy-of-a-tribal-revolt/">wrote</a> in a widely discussed essay about how "the uprising against AQI has dramatically improved security." Kilcullen sees the shift as being in the Sunnis' interest, which is plausible, considering the brutality AQI inflicted even on its nominal allies. </p>
<p>But what's truly in the Sunni interest -- at least as many Sunnis understand it -- is to again rule the country. Perceiving the United States’ receptivity to Sunnis who declare themselves against AQI, whose number has always been miniscule compared to the indigenous Sunni insurgency, the Sunnis have built a massive constellation of militias in the past few months with U.S. support. Known as "Concerned Local Citizens" -- "militia" being a taboo term -- the U.S. military totals the number of militiamen at a staggering 67,000. About 37,300 of them are under a contract with the U.S. and receive a stipend of $300 per month. </p>
<p>In theory, the CLCs are a series of neighborhood watch organizations that "augment local force protection, law enforcement and/or infrastructure security," says Col. Steve Boylan, Petraeus' spokesman. They help fight AQI and assorted miscreants, supplement U.S. and Iraqi forces, and are meant to be incorporated (eventually) into the regular Iraqi security apparatus. Their creation follows counterinsurgency best-practices, as Kilcullen wrote: "Provided they are under Iraqi government control (a non-trivial proviso), 'neighborhood watch' groups motivated by community loyalty and enlightened self-interest are not necessarily a bad thing." </p>
<p>The trouble is that Kilcullen's proviso is kicking in with a vengeance. U.S. commanders I've interviewed in the past few weeks suggest they have little actual oversight over what the CLCs in their areas of operations do. Maj. Gen. Kevin Bergner, a spokesman in Baghdad, <a href="http://www.defenselink.mil/dodcmsshare/BloggerAssets/2007-10/1010bergner_transcript.pdf">says</a> commanders "believe there is good accountability." But Col. David Sutherland, a brigade commander in Baquba, <a href="http://www.defenselink.mil/dodcmsshare/BloggerAssets/2007-10/1012suth.pdf">says</a> he recently detained a CLC leader for using his organization as a gang: They stockpiled illegal weapons, charged extortion money, and "raped a young girl." Typically, commanders must take on faith that those the CLCs harass are truly AQI. Very often what the CLCs are interested in is consolidating control over a particular area in a warlord-like way. The recently-assassinated Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, a key figure in the establishment of what would become the CLCs , was something of a highway bandit, known for telling the U.S. that rival tribes were <a href="http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1627400,00.html">AQI sympathizers</a>. </p>
<p>Nor are the CLCs getting absorbed within a distrustful, Shiite-run Iraqi security infrastructure. Col. Martin Stanton, who holds the reconciliation portfolio for Multinational Force-Iraq, <a href="http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/004632.php">warned</a> recently that the CLCs are growing so frustrated with the lack of support from Baghdad that they might easily turn their guns on the government. Anbar province officials visiting Washington earlier this month <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/03/world/middleeast/03anbar.html?ex=1352264400&amp;en=5fdc6bbe03a8c67a&amp;ei=5088&amp;partner=rssnyt&amp;emc=rss">sounded the same alarm</a>, complaining of a sectarian double standard in police recruitment. </p>
<p>Welcome to Crocker's "major challenge" to the viability of the Iraqi state. Only the rise of the CLCs shows that the challenge doesn't just apply to the U.S.' enemies in Iraq -- Sadr's crew -- but also to its allies of convenience. The CLCs represent the armed wing of aggrieved Sunni identity. They help guarantee the consolidation of power in particular cities, provinces and regions outside the writ of the state. And they won't be easily dislodged. The U.S. surely desires to see the CLCs incorporated into the regular Iraqi security forces, but the <a href="http://www.epic-usa.org/Default.aspx?tabid=1314">record to date</a> indicates that whatever CLCs actually do enlist will join up as agents of infiltration, loyal to their own agendas and not the state. More likely, they'll simply remain where they are, running their neighborhoods as mini-warlords. </p>
<p>That's where Maliki's own victory lap comes in. Last week Maliki abandoned efforts to <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSRYA82406820071108">bring the Sunnis back</a> into his government. As Marc Lynch observed of Maliki's recent <a href="http://www.williamgreider.com/article.php?article_id=24">George Aiken</a> moment: "Do not expect Maliki to pursue seriously any moves towards national reconciliation, defined in terms of legislation at the national level or agreements with Sunni political parties." Little wonder then that Maliki is showing no desire to open his security forces to the CLCs, which he views as a threat to his Shiite constituency's power. That only hardens the suspicion of the CLCs, creating further antagonism between Sunni and Shiite, and giving the vicious circle another violent rotation. </p>
<p>Perhaps it's not too late for Maliki to embrace the CLCs. But consider the implications if he doesn't. Following best counterinsurgency practices, the decision to support the rise -- the armed rise -- of the Sunnis against AQI made sense for the U.S. But the U.S. hasn't ever just had the destruction of AQI, a marginal if vicious group that didn't exist before the invasion, as its primary objective in Iraq: If it is, the troops should begin withdrawing immediately, mission (basically) accomplished. U.S. objectives for Iraq, broadly, concern the country's transformation into a stable staging ground for American power in the Middle East -- or at least, at this late hour, to keep Iraq from imploding. Absent actual reconciliation, which Stanton believes will be "generational" in coming, this year's strategy had the short-term effect of reducing violence to 2006 levels, and the probable long-term effect of hastening Iraq's disintegration. Even by the standards of Iraq's numerous predictable disasters, this one is glaring and obvious. We might as well call it victory. </p>
</div></div></div>Tue, 13 Nov 2007 23:20:56 +0000146793 at http://prospect.orgSpencer AckermanGood News for Iraq?http://prospect.org/article/good-news-iraq-0
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>It's a strange thought to entertain while the Turks <a href="http://www.suntimes.com/news/world/619300,CST-NWS-turk25.article">consider invading Iraqi Kurdistan</a>, but November 2007 is could be a fairly auspicious moment for sectarian reconciliation in Iraq. I know, I know, vain hopes exist to be crushed, and Iraq is a vale of tears and all that, but maybe, just maybe … OK, to be less flippant: Shiites have started to unite as Sunnis have started to expand their power. By some measurements, violence has decreased. November 2007 is a moment to test whether progress on reconciliation is possible, or whether both sides are gearing up for a larger conflict. </p>
<p>Start with the Shiites, who are knitting back together their frayed internal politics. In late August, over 50 Shiite civilians were killed during a power struggle in the holy city of Karbala between Mahdi Army militiamen and government forces -- which, in that city, are largely dominated by militiamen from the Badr Organization, the Mahdi Army's fiercest Shiite rival. The ensuing chaos caused so much disgust among Shiites that Moqtada al-Sadr, fearing his political fortunes might be at risk, ordered the Mahdi Army to stand down for six months. Then, on October 7, something nearly unthinkable happened: Badr overlord Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC), signed a <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-fg-iraq7oct07,1,4659173.story?coll=la-iraq-complete">truce</a> with Sadr. Imagine 50 Cent appearing on Ja Rule's comeback album and you'll get a sense of the significance here. </p>
<p>It doesn't follow from the truce that Shiite politics are healed. Last week in Basra, where Badr, Sadr and the Fadhila Party (which is not part of the truce) vie for power over the port through which much of Iraq's oil exports travel, Mahdi-linked gunmen <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/middleeastCrisis/idUSKHA455146">nearly assassinated</a> the Fadhila-linked police chief. (So much for the Mahdi Army stand-down.) Furthermore, Babak Rahimi, an astute analyst of Iraqi Shiite politics with the Jamestown Foundation, recently <a href="http://www.jamestown.org/terrorism/news/article.php?articleid=2373740">wrote</a> that the truce "lacks a genuine effort for reconciliation, as the two rival groups still maintain their ideological differences by defining each other as military foes on the street level, rather than as political competitors in the political arena." No one expects Sadr and Hakim -- who reportedly hate each other -- to lock arms. Each is probably buying time to shiv his rival at a more opportune moment. But neither would have inked the deal unless he felt unable to resist a Shiite urge for unity. Rahimi is careful not to read too much significance into the deal, but nevertheless says it represents "a huge step in improving intra-Shiite relations." </p>
<p>One reason that consolidation is occurring is because of the alarming rise of Sunni power. Rahimi observes that Iran threw its weight behind the Badr-Sadr pact as an insurance policy against a U.S. attack on Iran that might involve Sunni tribal proxies. Crazy as that might seem to Americans, to Iranians -- and to Iraqi Shiites -- it's not so easily dismissed, as proxy wars have a rich tradition in both Iraq and Iran. More fundamentally, the Sunnis are in their most commanding position since the war began, as General David Petraeus has rewarded Sunni tribal figures with cash, weapons and other support if they're willing to turn against al-Qaeda in Iraq. Petraeus's subordinate commanders in Anbar, Diyala, Ninewah and Salahuddin provinces have blessed Sunni (and in some cases Shiite) tribal militias that they call "concerned local citizens." </p>
<p>These "concerned local citizens" number as many as 67,000, according to the U.S. military. And the rise in Sunni military power has coincided, unsurprisingly, with a renewed focus on political strength. Tarek al-Hashemi, an Iraqi vice president whose Sunni bloc walked out of the Maliki government in July, pressed Nouri al-Maliki last week to commit to an <a href="http://www.alsumaria.tv/en/Iraq-News/1-9359-Hashimi-tackles-Iraqi-controversial-topics.html">amnesty</a> for thousands of detained Sunnis as a gesture to break the current political impasse. </p>
<p>There is trepidation among the Shiites when viewing an expanded Sunni militia structure. But there have also been some signs of receptivity. Anti-al-Qaeda Sunnis held a sprawling <a href="http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1674888,00.html">military parade</a> last week in Ramadi, last year's declared capital of the Islamic State of Iraq (big mistake, it turned out). An important Shiite political figure, national security adviser Mowaffaq al-Rubaie, attended, which last year would have meant his certain death, and delivered a paean to national unity. </p>
<p>Similarly, Hakim's son Ammar, who's played a large role in the SIIC since his father came down with cancer, similarly <a href="http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1675623,00.html">visited</a> with Anbar Province notables lately -- with representatives of Badr in tow. Since Badr is known for taking <a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/11/29/news/sunnis.php"> power drills to Sunni skulls</a>, the fact that the Ammar al-Hakim visit went off without violence suggests that the Anbar tribals are, at the least, willing to entertain once-feared Shiite enemies. And since earlier this month the Shiite bloc in the Baghdad government <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/10/03/MNF1SILVV.DTL">condemned</a> the U.S.-Sunni rapprochement as "embracing those terrorist elements which committed the most hideous crimes against our people," Ammar's visit could represent a furtive exploration of reconciliation possibilities. In other words, precisely the sort of thing that U.S. diplomats have tried to encourage. </p>
<p>It would come at an opportune time. There is a mass of <a href="http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/004116.php">confusion</a>, and indeed <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/24/AR2007092401929.html">deception</a>, about the tabulation of statistics on Iraqi civilian casualties. But the Associated Press, which keeps a tally of civilian casualty statistics, reported that October saw a <a href="http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2007/10/26/teachers_slaying_a_reminder_sectarian_violence_persists/">significant drop</a>, in sectarian killings -- about 284 bodies this month showed signs of sectarian-driven murder, compared with 507 in September. According to the AP, Iraq is <a href="http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071024/NEWS07/710240358/1009">on pace</a> to record fewer than 900 civilian deaths this month, over 100 fewer than September and nearly 1,000 fewer than August. The latest United Nations quarterly <a href="http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N07/534/52/PDF/N0753452.pdf?OpenElement">report</a> on Iraq found a "marked decline" in civilian casualties in Baghdad, but doesn't make an overall assessment about violence countrywide. </p>
<p>That doesn't mean security is good. But security is as good as it's been in Iraq since -- well, since last October, going by the civilian-casualties estimate. And give the surge its due for that. But it's perhaps even more important that the accelerants of sectarian violence appear diminished. Al-Qaeda in Iraq, while never as powerful as the administration portrayed, is without a Sunni base of support. (Some in the U.S. military are even ready to declare that <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/14/AR2007101401245.html?hpid=topnews">al-Qaida is defeated in Iraq.</a>) The Mahdi Army appears interested in curbing its excesses at the moment. Taken together, both Sunnis and Shiites have reason to see their greatest bogeymen on the defensive, at the least. Shiites are more united than they have been in at least a year, and Sunnis are able to negotiate from a position of strength. </p>
<p>There's breathing room here for negotiations, as shallow a breath as it may be. No one should believe reconciliation is at hand, or that the process of achieving it won't be protracted and laborious. But consider that with the decline of violence comes a rise in expectations. If those expectations aren't addressed expeditiously, what will remain will be frustrated sectarian factions that are more consolidated and, in the Sunni case, better armed than ever. It might be a good time to revitalize the stalled <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/30/world/middleeast/30diplo.html">forum</a> of leaders from Iraq and its neighbors. That's Iraq for you: each potentially hopeful situation is intertwined with a combustible one. </p>
<p>Oh, and as a postscript: The Turks are bombing northern Iraq. Meanwhile, the U.S. general with responsibility for the area plans to do, in his own words, <a href="http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=4074">"absolutely nothing"</a> to go after Kurdish terrorists who prompt the Turkish bombardment, even as Washington begs Ankara not to invade. Awesome! </p>
</div></div></div>Tue, 30 Oct 2007 17:48:55 +0000146755 at http://prospect.orgSpencer AckermanIn Iraq Foreverhttp://prospect.org/article/iraq-forever-0
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>Foolish liberals. Just days after President Bush announced in January that he would deploy an additional 21,500 troops to Iraq as a temporary "surge," liberals came up with a different buzzword. "Democrats oppose escalation of the war," newly elected House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told a cheering throng of supporters in San Francisco. "Let me repeat that: Democrats oppose escalation of the war." The obvious political gambit was to stoke public dissatisfaction and leverage it to de-escalate the war. </p>
<p>It was a smart choice of words. The public grew increasingly restive over Iraq; "escalation" added an unsubtle reminder of Vietnam. But it didn’t work. In September Bush announced that the "surge" would end in the summer of 2008. He portrayed himself as a stern commander in chief who would de-escalate the war "on success." And he claimed victory in the war was still possible while allowing nervous Republicans to point to the exits. </p>
<p>The Democrats failed on every front. Most obviously, the war goes on; 812 American troops died between Bush’s two speeches, along with at least 12,400 Iraqis. Less obviously, even on the margins of congressional debate, anti-war forces lost ground. Every war-funding bill passed without a timetable for withdrawal. </p>
<p>Climactic testimony from Gen. David H. Petraeus devolved into a slog over tactics rather than a vivid demonstration that not even a supremely talented general can redeem this war. </p>
<p>Worse yet, buried within Bush’s Sept. 13 speech was a belated recognition of the most salient fact of the entire war: Success in Iraq "will require U.S. political, economic, and security engagement that extends beyond my presidency." Bush declared himself "ready to begin … an enduring relationship." It was a casual declaration of what has been clear for months: The Bush administration is setting the stage for a costly commitment to keep a force in Iraq for decades to come, a commitment that will be exceedingly difficult for Bush’s successors to abridge or annul. </p>
<p>The war in Iraq can sometimes feel like a military commitment in search of a rationale. Yet there has never been any doubt among insiders that the Bush administration intended Iraq to become an outpost of U.S. power projection throughout the Middle East. "A future Iraq would be a major player in and partner of the U.S. with regard to the U.S.’ security strategy and presence in the Middle East," recalls Paul Pillar, who from 2001 until 2006 was the U.S. intelligence community’s chief Mideast analyst. "This wasn’t going to be just an altruistic endeavor -- ‘we’ll overthrow Saddam and then politely bow out.' ... That was never envisioned." </p>
<p>Without clear guidance from the Defense Department about the duration of their stay in Iraq, U.S. military commanders began constructing enormous bases capable of garrisoning numerous brigades for an indefinite period. By last year, four of them had sprung up along strategically important points throughout Iraq: in Balad, Tallil, Rawah, and Baghdad. The complex surrounding Baghdad International Airport resembles a county rather than a military base, comprising five camps connected in an efficient confederation and passable through a system of buses over about 25 square miles. </p>
<p>In other words, Bush’s recent statement about an enduring relationship was a belated recognition of long-emerging facts on the ground. In June, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, no great fan of the war, cautioned against seeking a decisive end to the mission. Praising the "Korea model," Gates looked to "a mutually agreed arrangement whereby we have a long and enduring presence." Similarly, Petraeus offered Congress a sketch for reducing troops until five army brigades -- 15,000 to 25,000 soldiers -- remain. In a little-noticed bit of testimony, Petraeus also said the government of Nouri al-Maliki has indicated that after 2008 it would like to "negotiate a long-term security agreement," known as a Status of Forces Agreement. A SOFA is the basic pact establishing the legal terms of garrisoning U.S. forces overseas for the long haul. In September, the Congressional Budget Office estimated, conservatively, that an indefinite presence would cost between $4 billion and $10 billion annually. </p>
<p>The number of Iraqis who want U.S. troops in their country indefinitely is statistically insignificant, according to a September poll conducted by ABC News and the BBC. But as long as Iraqis fear for their lives and the Iraqi government fears for its hold on power, a coterie of Iraqi officials is likely to seek a U.S. security guarantee. "Beyond the immediate term … we’ll need a continuing U.S. presence, and that is a period where a SOFA will be essential," explains Rend al-Rahim Francke, Iraq’s ambassador to the U.S. during Iyad Allawi’s interim government. While she is uncomfortable with an indefinite U.S. deployment, she adds, "The U.S. has a long-term presence in Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman, and this presence has not been questioned." </p>
<p>The assumption made by advocates of an enduring U.S. presence in Iraq is that the U.S. can improve security to the point where a reduced American presence would no longer be provocative to Iraqis. American advisers in Iraq, says one senior U.S. Army officer with extensive experience there, "can be as uncontroversial as their role in other parts of the world … American combat forces are not going to win the war in Iraq. Full stop. I believe it can be won with Iraqi security forces, and we can increase the chance of that happening with some number of American combat advisers." </p>
<p>Yet the experience of the last four years suggests that anger at the U.S. presence is a durable commodity both in and out of Iraq. "Any extended U.S. force presence, even a reduced one, clearly validates the al-Qaeda storyline," says Jeffrey Record, a professor of strategy at the Air War College in Alabama. "Every Arab Tom, Dick, and Harry who wants to express outrage at this crusader intrusion into the Arab heartland is going to go after those forces, as we are seeing now." If so, that renders Petraeus’ draw-down plan untenable: Five Army brigades is too large a force to merely monitor Iraqi forces, as Petraeus’ plan envisioned, yet it’s vastly too small to make a difference if those Iraqi forces are overwhelmed. </p>
<p>The U.S. has real interests in Iraq -- ensuring a stable flow of oil, preventing a regional conflagration, and arresting the spread of al-Qaeda, among others. Yet the U.S. presence in Iraq has consistently proven counterproductive to its aims. American interests, says Paul Pillar, are "not served enough to a degree that outweighs the negatives of our presence: continuing Iraqi casualties, the image of the U.S. occupying a foreign land unjustly, and U.S. troops being caught in the crossfire." </p>
<p>Perversely, Bush, in his final months in office, operates according to the political logic of an Iraqi insurgent: He wins by not obviously losing. It’s unclear whether the Democrats have an effective response. According to Jim Manley, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s spokesman, the strategy over the coming year will be to relentlessly schedule war-related legislation until, closer to the election, Republicans yield to "a real change in policy, including bringing our troops home as quickly as possible." </p>
<p>But how many of them will actually come home is another open question. So far, the major Democratic presidential contenders have only pledged to bring home combat forces, while they equivocate on a residual presence. Manley suggests that Bush’s plans for Iraq amount to little more than "just leaving it for the next president to deal with." If Bush can hold the line on Iraq through 2008, he’ll have gone a long way toward ensuring that his vision of long-term troops in Baghdad can be realized. After all, as the senior Army officer says, "The purpose of the U.S. Army is not just to fight and win the nation’s wars. It is the purpose of the Army, having won that war, to continue to occupy that country and stay in that region so as to not have to go to war there again." Someone should tell the liberals. </p>
</div></div></div>Sat, 20 Oct 2007 00:10:06 +0000146720 at http://prospect.orgSpencer AckermanThe Disgruntled Generalhttp://prospect.org/article/disgruntled-general
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>No one pities retired Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez quite like he pities himself. His reputation destroyed after his disastrous year as U.S. ground commander in Iraq -- including, most notoriously, the Abu Ghraib torture scandal -- Sanchez took a surprising move toward rehabilitation on Friday, delivering a <a href="http://www.militaryreporters.org/sanchez_101207.html">blistering indictment</a> of the war's history and its prospects before a military reporters' convention in Arlington. The war is "a nightmare with no end in sight," declared its former commander. President Bush, having failed to accept "the political and economic realities of this war," has adopted the surge in "a desperate attempt" to salvage his political fortunes, but will, at best, "stave off defeat." The press portrayed the speech as the latest in a series of volleys by retired generals furious with the Bush administration. Liberals eager for a cudgel against Bush may suddenly discover Sanchez's previously hidden virtues. </p>
<p>Except that Sanchez's speech is very different from the criticisms offered during the so-called "general's revolt" of 2006. Those accounts indicted the strategy of Donald Rumsfeld, the wisdom of commanders like Sanchez, and the opportunism of the administration as a whole. Sanchez's occasionally hysterical speech represents a triumph of embitterment, coupled with a cynical willingness to blame practically every civilian institution -- prowar, antiwar, whatever -- for the war's failures. "Our nation has not focused on the greatest challenge of our lifetime," Sanchez said. "The political and economic elements of power must get beyond the politics to ensure the survival of America." That's right: <i>the survival of America</i>. </p>
<p>Contrary to its billing, this was no mere attack on the administration. Sanchez's speech is perfectly positioned to accelerate the stabbed-in-the-back myth of explaining the war now<a href="http://www.harpers.org/archive/2006/06/0081080 "> emerging</a> on the right. That corrosive idea, revived most recently by revisionist Vietnam historian <a href="http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071015/perlstein">Mark Moyar</a>, holds that sybaritic and feckless civilians recklessly squander the hard-won gains of the military. </p>
<p>The current crop of right-wingers is too close to the Iraq war to accept Sanchez's vituperation, since it contains an attack on Bush. But as the war recedes and the need for scapegoating expands -- particularly if conservatives lose the White House next year -- Sanchez's speech reads like a foundational text for an aggrieved conservative worldview that the war was too virtuous for the country that fought it. And it makes a lot of sense that it's Sanchez, the most disgraced general of the entire war, who issued this <i>j'accuse</i>. </p>
<p>Consider the following line, one which didn't make it into most media accounts of the speech. "While the politicians espouse their rhetoric designed to preserve their reputations and their political power -- our soldiers die!" Sanchez is interested in attacking -- repeatedly -- unnamed "political leaders" whose partisan squabbling has "endangered the lives of our sons and daughters on the battlefield." </p>
<p>Like with all good dishonest myths, this gets causality backward. The war's domestic politics became so acrimonious precisely because the Bush administration not only plunged the country into a disaster but treated all criticism as a mark of disloyalty. As a result, politics is understandably a contest between those who consider the Iraq war a national imperative and those who consider it a national catastrophe. For each side, political power <i>is</i> a national security objective, and against the backdrop of a protracted war, it's not entirely clear why that's wrong. But Sanchez prefers to wipe the blood of 3,800 U.S. troops across the entire political spectrum, rather than presenting a subtle account of who's responsible for the tragedy. </p>
<p>And Sanchez has no shortage of culprits. In fact, it's Bush who gets off easiest here. Nearly everyone not in uniform is responsible for the horror. The press has strayed from ethical standards -- so far, he says, that a reversal of course is needed so "our democracy does not continue to be threatened." Civilians within the Bush administration, and particularly on the National Security Council, failed U.S. troops by not devising and implementing a strategy for Iraq that involved more than military power. Congress is a particular enemy: it abdicated "focused oversight" in favor of "exhortations, encouragements, investigations, studies and discussions." America itself does not escape blame. The "greatest failures" in Iraq are linked to the country's "lack of commitment, priority and moral courage in this war effort." Sanchez's comments might benefit war opponents in the short term, since the press hasn't emphasized this vitriol, but embittered conservatives looking to place blame practically have a catechism to read from. </p>
<p>It's hard to know what exactly to make of this. Does Sanchez actually mean to accuse the entire country of lacking "moral courage"? Can civilian-military relations possibly be that bad? After all, sustained popular admiration for the troops fighting the war has been a hallmark of the country's pro- and anti-war movements since the invasion. Congress can be subjected to any number of critiques, both hawkish and dovish, but the fact remains that Congress has approved every war-funding request Bush has submitted. </p>
<p>Sanchez has a good point that civilian agencies in the government don't treat wartime remotely as seriously as the military -- you often hear military commanders in Iraq understandably bemoan the relative lack of diplomats, economists, agronomists, civilian engineers, etc. -- but Sanchez's hysteria is not easily explained. That is, unless you take into account Sanchez's guilty conscience and his anger over his disgrace. </p>
<p>That conscience is made guilty, of course, by the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal specifically, and the explosion of the insurgency during his year in command more generally. On September 14, 2003, in response to pressure from an effort led by Donald Rumsfeld to extract intelligence from Iraqi detainees on the insurgency, Sanchez issued a <a href=" http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/37/10098">memorandum</a> authorizing interrogation techniques imported from the Geneva Conventions-exempt Guantanamo Bay detention facility. Among them were the use of dogs, stress positions, sleep management and light, noise and dietary manipulation. Within a month, General John Abizaid, Sanchez's superior at Central Command, revoked the memo, but the techniques bearing Sanchez's imprimatur were on display at Abu Ghraib nevertheless. Senator Jack Reed asked Sanchez on May 19, 2004, if he ever "ordered or approved" the techniques. The same Sanchez who now attacks the ethics of Congress and the press replied that he "never approved the use of any of those methods," prompting the ACLU to accuse Sanchez of <a href="http://www.aclu.org/safefree/general/17554leg20050330.html">perjury</a>. </p>
<p> Abu Ghraib was only one element in Sanchez's manifold failures as a general in Iraq. Lacking clear leadership or central coordination, his division commanders essentially ran their own occupations, resulting in drastically varying results -- from the heavy-handed tactics of Major General Ray Odierno in Anbar to the population-centric approach of Major General David Petraeus. In account after account from Iraq veterans in <i>Washington Post</i> reporter Tom Ricks's definitive book <i>Fiasco</i>, Sanchez is described as a tactician unable to see the bigger picture of the war. </p>
<p>Defying common sense among both liberals and conservatives, he <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4717276/">told</a> Tim Russert in April 2004, "the forces that we have on the ground are adequate," -- even as both the Sunni and the Shiite insurgencies inflamed the country. Whatever divides civilians and soldiers, it's not respect for Sanchez. One active-duty officer summed up the catastrophe in Iraq by telling Ricks, "In Vietnam we left Westy [Commanding General William Westmoreland] in. In Iraq we left Sanchez in." </p>
<p> The Iraq war was probably doomed from the start. And while Sanchez couldn't have won the war, he could have contributed less to its loss. And this is what Sanchez's account never grapples with: The proposition that a war likely to fail shouldn't be fought. That omission makes sense. After all, if Sanchez really saw the writing on the wall in July 2003 -- the beginning of his command -- he was derelict in his responsibility to either refuse command or to speak out in favor of drastic changes in strategy. Instead, he's emblematic of the general officer described in Lt. Col. Paul Yingling's recent <a href="http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2007/05/2635198">essay</a> "A Failure In Generalship": supine to civilian zealotry, hobbled by conventional wisdom, ignorant of counterinsurgency, and deceptive to the public. It should probably come as no surprise that his account of who's to blame for Iraq is as bitter and distorted as it is. </p>
<p>Earlier this year, Sanchez told <a href="http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/060407L.shtml">AFP</a>, "it's not about blame because there's nobody out there that is intentionally trying to screw things up for our country." The obviously self-pitying Sanchez of October 2007 has clearly amended his views. His new perspective is no sounder, and just as corrosive, than the ones that guided him in Baghdad. Having abetted one catastrophe, Sanchez may do even greater violence to the historical record. </p>
</div></div></div>Tue, 16 Oct 2007 16:16:18 +0000146703 at http://prospect.orgSpencer AckermanIraq Forever?http://prospect.org/article/iraq-forever
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>Having lost the battle over the surge, Democrats in the Senate are back to an incrementalist approach to the war. After Bush <a href=" http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=in_the_wake_of_petraeus">endorsed</a> General David Petraeus's plan to return to pre-surge combat strength of about 130,000 troops in Iraq by the end of July, the Democrats mobilized. </p>
<p>Senator Jim Webb, the Vietnam veteran who won his Virginia seat last year on an antiwar platform, will push forward for a third time with his bill mandating that troops serving in Iraq remain at home for at least an equivalent amount of time as their deployments. The bill is a two-fer: Not only does it take a large burden off the Army's shoulders, but it would, in practice, constrain the Pentagon's ability to keep troop strength in Iraq at Petraeus' desired levels. Unsurprisingly, Defense Secretary Bob Gates replied on Friday that Webb's "well-intentioned" bill would create problems for the next year's meticulously planned deployment calendar -- and in any event, he'd prefer to drop down to 100,000 troops in Iraq by the end of 2008. </p>
<p>If the current debate between Webb and Gates over force postures remains on those terms, it'll be a sober, mature and respectful accounting between serious defense professionals. It may well result in a more sensible deployment schedule for active-duty Army soldiers in Iraq, who now face an unprecedented "deployment-to-dwell" ratio of 15 months in Iraq to 12 months at home. And it will obscure the starkest fact to emerge from last week's Petraeus/Crocker hearings: The U.S. will remain in Iraq, in some capacity, forever. </p>
<p>One of President Bush's most under-appreciated maneuvers of 2007 was his recasting of the debate over the war into a debate over the surge. Commentators endlessly interpreted the surge as a "last chance" for the war to succeed -- something the Bush administration, crucially, never promised. But as a result of this misperception, endless inquiry over the last several months has focused on whether the surge has succeeded on its own terms: whether it pacified Baghdad; whether it deserves credit for the Sunni tribal shift against al-Qaeda; whether it nurtured a glacial sectarian reconciliation. It's a pattern of analysis that rests on a simple proposition: Since the surge is the last chance for the war to succeed, if it has failed, then the war must be brought to an end. </p>
<p>That proposition is false. Whatever the surge's virtues, (is a reduction in sectarian violence in Baghdad the result of better U.S. strategy or the fruit of a victorious Shiite strategy to cleanse Baghdad of Sunnis?) it has had a clear political benefit for the president, turning criticism of the war into criticism of a <i>slice</i> of the war. General Petraeus made it clear last week that the infusion of troops into Baghdad was what allowed him to emphasize a strategy of population protection that doesn't apply in less-troop dense areas of Iraq, so when troop strength returns to 2006 levels, the strategy will accordingly shift. Those who criticize Petraeus because they want to stop the war will have gained little more ground than they occupied in December 2006. </p>
<p>What will the White House have gained? For one thing, an enduring presence in Iraq. In his <a href=" http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/09/20070913-2.html"> speech</a>, Bush said that "Iraqi leaders" -- whom he meant, he left unstated -- have "asked for an enduring relationship with America" extending "beyond my presidency." What was once a commitment to remain in Iraq "as long as necessary, and not one day more" is now an admission that "we are ready to begin building that [enduring] relationship." </p>
<p>No one should be surprised. America tends not to invest nearly a trillion dollars and thousands of lives in places it means to leave. Bush's comments have precedent in Gates' <a href="http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=3974">June remarks</a> that Korea was a better parallel for Iraq than Vietnam -- Korea, of course, being a place where U.S. troops have guaranteed stability for half a century. Finally, when General Petraeus <a href=" http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/docs/petraeus-slides/?resultpage=14&amp;"> outlined</a> his plan for troop reductions in Congress last week, its final phase stopped with five U.S. brigades, a strength of about 20,000 to 25,000 troops, still in Iraq. Petraeus didn't box himself in with any timeline by which the United States will reach that reduced presence, but his chart extends outward, indefinitely. Behold: the enduring relationship. Never mind that the latest BBC/ABC/NHK <a href=" http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6983027.stm"> poll</a> of Iraqis found a statistically insignificant number who want American troops never to leave. </p>
<p>If there's one single characteristic that defines the coming U.S.-Iraq relationship, it's that it's emerging in the complete absence of debate. Perhaps as a testimony to her inflated reputation, no one in Congress is bothering to ask Secretary of State Condoleezza what the administration wants the U.S.'s diplomatic and military commitment to Iraq to be by January 2009. It's true that the U.S. has enduring interests in Iraq, which largely boil down to counterterrorism and, as Alan Greenspan has helpfully conceded, oil. And not even the most hardcore war opponents propose, say, cutting diplomatic or economic ties with Baghdad, so some relationship with Iraq is destined to endure. But, true to form, there's a complete absence of guidance emerging from the administration about what it <i>wants</i> from a long-term commitment to Iraq. (Leave aside for a moment the likelihood that Iraq has yet to resemble practically anything that the Bush administration has ever planned.) </p>
<p>This week, the Senate will take up defense policy once again, and once again, Webb's worthy amendment will go up for a vote. Democratic leader Harry Reid has abandoned previous pledges to put forward a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq, knowing that the Senate doesn't have the 67 votes, and in the hope that bills like Webb's can attract the GOP support necessary to stop the war incrementally. </p>
<p>It may well be a sensible approach. But while Reid and the Democrats have little option but to think in terms of the next political skirmish over the war, the Bush administration, completely in private, is sketching out a commitment to Iraq intended to last for decades. Bush got his way on the surge largely due to an unrecognized myopia by his opponents. If the trend continues, he stands a good chance of turning a catastrophic war into an open-ended commitment that his successors will have a hard time limiting. </p>
</div></div></div>Tue, 18 Sep 2007 04:46:43 +0000146629 at http://prospect.orgSpencer AckermanThe Petraeus Workouthttp://prospect.org/article/petraeus-workout
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>It was a wet and chilly spring morning in Mosul, the sun barely up, and a handful of company commanders from the Fourth Brigade Combat Team of the First Cavalry Division started loosening up. Dressed in heather-gray Army tees and black shorts, the bleary-eyed captains in their early 30s stretched their calves and back muscles and bounced on the balls of their feet into squats, getting ready to go five miles around Forward Operating Base Marez with a legendarily competitive runner.</p>
<p>A black SUV crunched the gravel in front of the gym, and out of its rear door popped a short, cable-taut 50-something in a black t-shirt and immodestly short shorts. "All right," clapped General David Petraeus, his black-gloved hands making a soft <i>thwap</i>. "It'll be a social run." He paused. "Unless someone challenges us here." </p>
<p>His driver had to explain that, "He'll run with these guys, he'll take it easy. But if someone sprints by him, then he'll just <i>go</i>." During the run, the captains hung back a couple steps -- to save their breath for when Petraeus asked them about conditions in Mosul, but also out of general self-preservation. On the side of the road, young soldiers whipped out digital video recorders to capture their commanding general going by. Petraeus threw each a thumbs-up, returned by an excitable "<i>Woo</i>!" </p>
<p>It's not accurate to say that Petraeus enjoys answering questions about Iraq during his morning exercise. But he understands that doing so accrues value to his reputation as both honest and indomitable. Those qualities explain why President Bush, who possesses neither, tapped Petraeus in 2006 to take over the disastrous war and attempt to reenergize a weary public. </p>
<p>As I wheezed and waddled behind Petraeus, the general gave his assessment of Mosul, the city where he made his reputation as commander of the 101st Airborne. "There's a lot of good [Iraqi security forces] out here, a strong police chief, two strong Army divisions. It comes down to leadership, to getting a good mix of ethnic and sectarian leaders here," he said, not breaking his stride. The mixed civilian-military reconstruction effort, known as a Provincial Reconstruction Team, is "very good, one of the best. That's another heartening activity here in Iraq. But there's still a lot of Saddamist and Baathist activity here, and that's why Uday and Qusay were killed here. Also a big al-Qaeda line comes through here." We didn't get half a mile before I collapsed into the SUV tailing the general, unable to keep up. </p>
<p>But the real workout began as soon as the run ended. Petraeus, barely sweating, barreled into the base's spacious gym, his shoulders tucked squarely in, while the captains caught their breath and followed. Catching up again, I asked him how the surge was going as he pitched his mud-caked sneakers into a cubbyhole. "There are some encouraging signs," he said cautiously. "It's still pretty early, but sectarian violence and murders are down [in Baghdad], and that's hugely important. It's about [stopping] sectarian violence." He qualified his statement. "There are still, obviously, huge car bombs, since al-Qaeda is trying to reignite sectarian violence." </p>
<p>Expect Petraeus' long-awaited congressional testimony next week to fit the pattern on display in the Mosul gym. The war he describes is a war of figurative inches, the infinitesimal movement of a thousand intersecting measurements. Each outcome he sees he lards with qualifiers and caveats, both to ground himself in analytic firmament and to reassure a journalist or a congressman or a diplomat that he revels in complexity and detail. Referring to a congested traffic circle in the center of Mosul, he said one "canary in the coal mine" for security is "whether or not people pay attention to the traffic signals," or fear they'll be incinerated by a car bomb if they stop when instructed. But even his qualifiers reinforce the broader message that the United States needs to stay and fight. After all, if it's al-Qaeda that's responsible for Iraq's rampant sectarianism, how responsible would a U.S. withdrawal be? </p>
<p>Politics in the country was moving slowly, he conceded, but he was impressed with the performance of the Iraqi Army in Baghdad. I wasn't exactly sure what the connection was. Could a competent Army really convince Sunnis to accept minority status, or stop Shiites from hoarding power? But nothing is a non sequitur to Petraeus. Instead, the strategy he describes is one where each small contingency exerts an ephemeral but real influence on every seemingly unrelated aspect of the war. Think of the elaborate contraptions Tom hinges together to catch Jerry, all funnels and twists and levers snaking around the room. </p>
<p>The trouble is that interconnectedness is a two-way street. What Petraeus doesn't emphasize is that, for instance, the collapse of meaningful politics consigns his intricate strategy to, at best, a tourniquet. Right now, there's credible talk of a parliamentary <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-allawi._slysep01,1,6087265,print.story?coll=chi_tab01_layout&amp;ctrack=2&amp;cset=true">coup</a> to depose Nouri al-Maliki, possibly with U.S. backing -- a symptom of the fundamental sectarian instability in the Iraqi political process. Whatever amount of greater security Petraeus has created in Baghdad, the city now accounts for about the <a href="http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003631296">same percentage</a> of the war's civilian deaths as it did a year ago, which is progress -- politics has deteriorated rather than improved. That means the rationale for the surge has collapsed. Better, in Congress, to emphasize the discrete achievement instead of the bigger picture. </p>
<p>Petraeus the commander is determined. Even more determined is Petraeus the workout coach. Rallying his captains in a tiny corner of the gym, Petraeus began a program of soldiering lessons disguised as calisthenics. Not a single push-up or bicycle kick went unmodified in that room: he had a critique of each standard approach to exercise. Put your fingertips behind your ears and sit up slightly -- "but not so you're doing a crunch" -- and fly your legs out with your heels touching, elevating both shoulders and legs a half foot off the ground. "We'll do this 49 more times and then you'll get a coin," he joked with the captains. Another torturous routine, which could be called "Shoelaces," involves pulling up slightly on a chin-up bar and swinging your legs up until the tops of your feet ("the shoelaces!" he instructed) touch the bar. He pulled off the maneuver a staggering 15 times, prompting a captain almost half Petraeus' age to moan, "Oh, shit." Above all, Petraeus acted as a motivator, investing his team in feeling like all his instructions were within reach. "This tires you out that day, but it gives you stamina over the long run," he noted. "And this is about stamina. It's absolutely grueling." </p>
<p>That might well be a coda for the end of Petraeus' first act as Iraq commander. This week, in advance of his testimony, Congress will receive reports noting that the war has failed to deliver on almost every indicator of progress, and that the Iraqi police are so thoroughly corrupt, incompetent, and sectarian that the United States might as well start training a whole new force. On the left, people wonder how objective and candid Petraeus will prove, noting that he penned a parliamentary <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49283-2004Sep25.html">op-ed</a> tacitly supporting Bush weeks before the 2004 election. </p>
<p>Petraeus has two options before him for his testimony, both of which were on display in the gym that March morning. He can point to his discrete, detailed successes as accumulating a greater stability that needs time to gestate, or he can emphasize the need for "stamina," lest the entire project collapse into a regional disaster. Some of those discrete successes will be unintended consequences of his command, most notably the Sunni shift against al-Qaeda in Anbar and Diyala Provinces, the result of al-Qaeda overplaying its hand in Iraq in 2006. What was once "all about [stopping] sectarian violence" is now about any argument that can buy the war effort more time, in the hope that something, <i>anything</i>, resembling stability can materialize. </p>
<p>And as much as Petraeus will clearly never give up -- for reasons both sincere and professional -- when he speaks for himself next week, he'll be describing what amounts to a lost cause. After all, in the end, all his exhortations couldn't yield more than five Shoelaces from any of his charges. </p>
</div></div></div>Tue, 04 Sep 2007 15:50:56 +0000146594 at http://prospect.orgSpencer Ackerman